T-0, ignition sequence starts and then immediately aborts. Launch attempt still not officially scrubbed. Launch window closes in about 50 minutes Launch is scrubbed
Apollo 12 was struck by lightning almost immediately after liftoff, causing a complete loss of electrical power to the command module. What happened next will astound you!
i cannot wait for the exponential growth in discoveries both human driven (mars etc) and deep space in the coming 20+ years fuck yes everyone needs to be taxed $1 a year and corporations another $10 directly to manned space flight. that ~$2b a year is nothing collectively but thats 15%+ to nasa and can accelerate a lot of their timelines. so make that 2 taxes swim is ok with.. gas tax, and nasa tax. fuck everything else
Top 50 pics that Scott Kelly took during his 11-month stay on the ISS. Spoilered so we don't get a longcat. They're big, too. Spoiler Lake Tengis, Kazakhstan: Unknown location: Aleutian Island volcano: Oil fields in west Texas: Australia: Patagonia: Border of Egypt and Libya: Strait of Gibraltar: Paris, France: The Richat Structure, Mauritania: Barcelona, Spain: Blizzard Jonas over the United States: Sea and sand, Bahamas: Mozambique: The Himalayas: Tokyo, Japan: Lake Urmia, Iran: Reef island, unknown location: Reflective waterways, unknown location in United States: Industrial site, China: Central America: Dresden, Germany: Athens, Greece: Cygnus resupply spacecraft, launch as seen from orbit: Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Glaciers in Tajikstan: South Korea compared to Best Korea: Spanish coastline: Mount Fuji, Japan: Sahara Desert: The Alps in Italy: San Rafael reef, Utah: Novopersianovka, Russia: Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam: Sunset at unknown location: Pantelleria, Italy: Washington, D.C.: East coast of United States during the Polar Vortex: Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania: Atmospheric sunrise: Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: Honolulu, Hawaii: La'nga Co Lake, Tibet: Sinai Peninsula: Monaco: Unknown location in South America: San Francisco, California: Bighorn River, Montana: New York City, New York: The last sunrise during his ISS stay:
Hubble telescope breaks record, measures most distant galaxy ever seen The telescope, which was launched into orbit in 1990, has gazed at a galaxy called GN-z11, which is 13.4 billion light-years away. And that means, of course, that scientists are observing the galaxy not as it is today, but as it was all those years ago -- a mere 400 million years after the Big Bang, which scientists believe created the known universe. "We've taken a major step back in time, beyond what we'd ever expected to be able to do with Hubble," Pascal Oesch, of Yale University, who is the principal researcher, said this week. "We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age." Measuring the galaxy's 'redshift' Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have measured the distance to the farthest galaxy ever seen -- Galaxy GN-z11. The galaxy is in the inset. The viewing of this galaxy, actually, is not new; what is new is the estimate of its distance from Earth. For the first time for a galaxy so far away, researchers used Hubble's technology to split the light from the galaxy into its component colors, NASA said on its website. "Astronomers measure large distances by determining the 'redshift' of a galaxy," the NASA statement explained. "This phenomenon is a result of the expansion of the universe; every distant object in the universe appears to be receding because its light is stretched to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels through expanding space to reach our telescopes. The greater the redshift, the farther the galaxy." Producing stars at a huge rate The distant galaxy is 25 times smaller than the Milky Way, NASA said -- or was, all those 13.4 billion years ago. But, boy, was it expanding fast, forming stars at a rate about 20 times faster than the Milky Way does today. "It's amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form," said Garth Illingworth, of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon." But it won't be long before scientists are looking even farther into the distance and peering even further into the past. The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to be launched into space in 2018. "Essentially, Hubble can see the equivalent of 'toddler galaxies' and Webb Telescope will be able see 'baby galaxies,' " NASA said on its website. Follow @Don_Melvin
You know, in the midst of all the threads about sports and naked chicks and all the other threads I read on this board, this is probably my favorite. Does not get the respect it deserves
I'm gonna guess the landing was unsuccessful @elonmusk: Rocket landed hard on the droneship. Didn't expect this one to work (v hot reentry), but next flight has a good chance.
So Hubble is 26 years old, was almost given up on due to a faulty main mirror, and is due to be replaced by the Webb scope in coming years. If Webb can achieve 1/10 of the shit that Hubble has, we're going to be able to see God himself lighting the fuse of the huge fuckin firecracker.
Damage to the Apollo 13 service module captured after separation from the command module shortly before re-entry.
Wrap your head around sending a hummer sized camera/vehicle to a planet that is between 2.6 and 4.6 billion miles away at any given point to take a series of pictures. Don't forget that this planet is moving through space at a rate of 2.9 miles per second. Oh and that hummer sized camera/vehicle is moving at at 10.1 miles per second. Yeah.
just finished this up, good shit. guy spent like 6 or 7 months on the ISS. is canadian as f but otherwise its a good read about how he became an astronaut, preparation in life, and the crazy russians.
he was the one that did the bowie thing a few years back, which if you havent seen, is pretty fucking cool.
the MASS of that is just ridiculous where did the MASS of the universe come from? while quantum mechanics maybe be able to explain it "just happened' i will never be able to actually understand that explanation.
hawkings answer that the universe just 'is', wasnt created, nothing ever existed before it because it has ALWAYS existed makes me wanna just walk the earth and contemplate ----- First of all, note that mass and energy are equivalent. So, the total mass of the Universe need not be conserved even though the total energy (taking into account the energy that is equivalent of the mass in the Universe) is conserved. Mass and energy are related by the famous equation E=mc2. Hence if there is enough energy, photons can create matter-antimatter pairs. This is called pair production and is responsible for the mass in the Universe. As to where everything came from, there is no conclusive opinion. One idea was that the Universe was created from vacuum. This is because according to quantum theory, the apparently quiescent vacuum is not really empty at all. For example, it is possible for an electron and a positron (a matter antimatter pair) to materialize from the vacuum, exist for a brief flash of time and then disappear into nothingness. Such vacuum fluctuations cannot be observed directly as they typically last for only about 10-21 seconds and the separation between the electron and positron is typically no longer than 10-10 cm. However, through indirect measurements, physicists are convinced that these fluctuations are real. Hence, any object in principle might materialize briefly in the vacuum. The probability for an object to materialize decreases dramatically with the mass and complexity of the object. In 1973, Edward Tyron proposed that the Universe is a result of a vacuum fluctuation. The main difficulty of this proposal is that the probability that a 13.7 billion year old Universe could arise from this mechanism is extremely small. In addition, physicists would question Tyron's starting point: if the Universe was born from empty space, then where did the empty space come from? (Note that from the point of view of general relativity, empty space is unambiguously something, since space is not a passive background, but instead a flexible medium that can bend, twist and flex.) In 1982, Alexander Vilenkin proposed an extension of Tyron's idea and suggested that the Universe was created by quantum processes starting from "literally nothing", meaning not only the absence of matter, but the absence of space and time as well. Vilenkin took the idea of quantum tunneling and proposed that the Universe started in the totally empty geometry and then made a quantum tunneling transition to a non-empty state (subatomic in size), which through inflation (the Universe expands exponentially fast for a brief period of time which causes its size to increase dramatically) came to its current size. Another idea is from Stephen Hawking and James Hartle. Hawking proposed a description of the Universe in its entirety, viewed as a self-contained entity, with no reference to anything that might have come before it. The description is timeless, in the sense that one set of equations delineates the Universe for all time. As one looks to earlier and earlier times, one finds that the model Universe is not eternal, but there is no creation event either. Instead, at times of the order of 10-43 seconds, the approximation of a classical description of space and time breaks down completely, with the whole picture dissolving into quantum ambiguity. In Hawking's words, the Universe "would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE."
Video in link. Lander will have a 2 meter drill. http://www.space.com/32182-exomars-mars-mission-launch-preview.html European-Russian Mission to Mars Launches Next Week By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | March 8, 2016 07:30am ET Artist's concept of Europe's Trace Gas Orbiter releasing the Schiaparelli landing demonstrator near Mars. Credit: ESA The next robotic mission to Mars will launch in less than a week, if all goes according to plan. The first part of the two-phase, joint European-Russian ExoMars mission is scheduled to blast off atop a Russian Proton rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kakakhstan on March 14. A slight delay can be accommodated; the launch window extends through March 25. The Proton's payload consists of the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and a lander called Schiaparelli, both of which should arrive at Mars in October after a seven-month cruise. TGO will sniff the Red Planet's air from orbit using four scientific instruments, hunting for possible signs of life. [Gallery: Europe's ExoMars Mission in Pictures] "The orbiter will perform detailed, remote observations of the Martian atmosphere, searching for evidence of gases of possible biological importance, such as methane and its degradation products," European Space Agency (ESA) officials wrote in a mission description. "The instruments on board the orbiter will carry out a variety of measurements to investigate the location and nature of sources that produce these gases," the officials added. "The scientific mission is expected to begin in December 2017 and will run for five years." TGO will also map subsurface hydrogen to a depth of 3.3 feet (1 meter), an effort that could reveal accessible deposits of water-ice on Mars; this information could, in turn, guide the choice of landing sites for future missions, ESA officials have said. Schiaparelli, meanwhile, is an entry, descent and landing demonstrator designed to help lay the foundation for the second part of the ExoMars mission, which will launch a life-hunting rover toward the Red Planet in 2018 or 2020. (TGO will serve as the communications link between this rover and mission control.) Schiaparelli will also gather environmental data on the Martian surface for as long as the probe's batteries last, likely between two and eight days, ESA officials have said. NASA was ESA's original partner on ExoMars, whose name is short for Exobiology on Mars. But the American space agency dropped out in February 2012, citing budget issues. About a year later, ESA signed a deal with Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, to pick up the slack. ESA leads the ExoMars mission and is responsible for most of the spacecraft hardware. Russia is providing several components: Proton rockets for both launches, the lander that will deliver the ExoMars rover to the planet's surface, and some scientific instruments on TGO and the rover. ExoMars is Europe's second Red Planet mission. The first was Mars Express, which consisted of an orbiter and a lander that launched together in June 2003. The orbiter continues to study the planet to this day, though the lander, known as Beagle 2, went silent shortly after separating from the Mars Express mothership. It was never heard from again. After a long search, Beagle 2 was finally spotted in January 2015, in images captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These photos showed that Beagle 2 made it to the Martian surface intact; the lander may have failed because its solar panels didn't deploy completely, mission team members have said.
Belongs here because it'll probably end up in a satellite or telescope or something else space-y. A new version of the world's blackest material is so dark that spectrometers can't measure it By Rob Thubron on March 8, 2016, 9:30 AM In 2014, UK company Surrey NanoSystems created a material so dark that it absorbed 99.96 percent of the light that touched it. Now, scientists have created a new version that is even blacker. Incredibly, it’s so dark that spectrometers can’t measure the percentage of light that it absorbs. The material, which is called Vantablack, is a special coating made from carbon nanotubes approximately 3500 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. The tubes get packed so tightly together that when light enters the gaps between them it bounces around and can’t escape. "To understand this effect, try to visualise walking through a forest in which the trees are around 3 km tall instead of the usual 10 to 20 metres. It’s easy to imagine just how little light, if any, would reach you,” said researchers. Using a new development process, Surrey Nanosystems have made an upgraded version of Vantablack; one so dark that even the most powerful spectrometer in the world can’t measure its light-absorbing properties. The material has hundreds of potential applications. In addition to sensors, cameras, and other scientific equipment, Vantablack may end up being utilized by the military. Stealth vehicles coated with the material would be more effective, and soldiers could become almost invisible when wearing Vantablack-covered gear at night. We can also expect the super-dark material to soon enter the art world, as renowned sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor announced that he’s bought the exclusive rights to use Vantablack in his work. "Imagine a space that's so dark that as you walk in, you lose all sense of where you are, what you are, and especially all sense of time," he told the BBC. Don’t expect to be able to buy Vantablack and coat your PC case, clothes, or car with it, though, as it’s not available to private individuals at this time.
Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Race by Matthew Brzezinski I read it a few months ago. It's about the origins of both the American and Russian space programs. It talks about the political fights between which branch of he military would develop the rockets, the creation of NASA, and the failures and successes of both the good guys and the Ruskies. It's well worth your time. Fun fact: If it wasn't for Sputnik, we wouldn't have student loans. Spoiler Eisenhower felt that the only way to compete with the dirty pinkos and win the space race was to get more kids to go to college and concentrate on STEM. To encourage them, he created the student loan program.
http://www.usnews.com/news/offbeat/...ii-promises-prime-view-of-total-solar-eclipse Cliffs: Astronomer figures out the best place to see the eclipse from is on a specific flight going from Alaska to Hawaii. He buys a ticket, calls the airline to see if they can change the flight to 25 minutes later, which they actually do. Films the eclipse as they fly through the shadow of he moon with his excited space nerd commentary. Video is pretty cool seeing the shadow approach on the cloud deck.
I would have been thought it was cool AF but how many of those 160 passengers were like WTF when the pilot was like "sorry were a half hour late to our Hawaiian vacation, but like 12 of you are just on here to film the sun"
Recent results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland hint at activity going on beyond the standard model of particle physics - which means we could finally be about to enter a new era in physics. Right now, the standard model is the best explanation we have for how the Universe works and how it's held together. But there are big gaps - most noticeably, the fact that the model doesn't actually account for gravity - so scientists have spent decades probing the boundaries of physics for signs of any activity that the standard model can't explain. And now they've found one. The discrepancy deals with a particle called the B meson. According to the standard model, B mesons should decay at very specific angles and frequencies - but those predictions don't match up what's been seen in LHC experiments, suggesting that something else is going on. And if we can figure out what that is, it'll take us closer to unlocking some of the mysteries in our Universe. "Up to now all measurements match the predictions of the standard model,"said lead researcher Mariusz Witek, from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. "However, we know that the standard model cannot explain all the features of the Universe. It doesn’t predict the masses of particles or tell us why fermions are organised in three families. How did the dominance of matter over antimatter in the universe come about? What is dark matter? Those questions remain unanswered." The data in question was collected in 2011 and 2012, and was first spotted last year, when scientists noticed that the rate of B meson decay didn't match up with standard model predictions. But now the team of Polish researchers has shown that it's not just the rate of decay, but also the angle of decay that's at odds with the standard model. "To put it in terms of the cinema, where we once only had a few leaked scenes from a much-anticipated blockbuster, the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] has finally treated fans to the first real trailer," said Witek. According to the standard model, B mesons are made up of a light quark and a heavy beauty antiquark - and because of that quark-antiquark pairing, they decay rapidly, and should shoot their products off at specific angles. While physicists had already noticed something odd about the timing of that decay, they weren't able to pick up the discrepancy in the decay angle, because their method of measuring it wasn't accurate enough. But thanks to a new technique developed by the Polish physicists, they were able to show that not only did B mesons in 2011 decay at an angle that wasn't predicted by the standard model, the same thing also happened in 2012. The researchers are very clear that we can't yet call this a discovery - we need more data before we can say for sure whether what's been found is actually real. The team has currently reached a standard deviation of 3.4 sigma, which is pretty good, but to talk about a new discovery, they need to get above 5 sigma - which would mean there's less than a one in 3.5 million chance that the discovery is a fluke. So what does it mean if B mesons decay at different angles than the Standard Model predicts? It could suggest the activity of a brand new particle, and the most popular hypothesis at the moment is that a new intermediate Z-prime boson - not predicted by the standard model - is influencing the decay of these B mesons. The good news is that the LHC has recently started smashing protons together at higher energy levels than ever before, and the physicists will soon have a whole new batch of data to analyse. And that data could hold the key to taking physics to the next level. "Just like it is with a good movie: everybody wonders what’s going to happen in the end, and nobody wants to wait for it," says Witek.
Poster illustrates every orbiter, lander, rover, flyby, and impactor that completed its mission and shows each trajectory.
Rosetta finds magnetic field-free bubble at comet 11 March 2016 ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has revealed a surprisingly large region around its host comet devoid of any magnetic field. When ESA’s Giotto flew past Comet Halley three decades ago, it found a vast magnetic-free region extending more than 4000 km from the nucleus. This was the first observation of something that scientists had until then only thought about but had never seen. Interplanetary space is pervaded by the solar wind, a flow of electrically charged particles streaming from the Sun and carrying its magnetic field across the Solar System. But a comet pouring lots of gas into space obstructs the solar wind. At the interface between the solar wind and the coma of gas around the active comet, particle collisions as well as sunlight can knock out electrons from the molecules in the coma, which are ionised and picked up by the solar wind. This process slows the solar wind, diverting its flow around the comet and preventing it from directly impacting the nucleus. Along with the solar wind, its magnetic field is unable to penetrate the environment around the comet, creating a region devoid of magnetic field called a diamagnetic cavity. Comet on 26 July 2015 Prior to Rosetta arriving at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, scientists had hoped to observe such a magnetic field-free region in the environment of this comet. The spacecraft carries a magnetometer as part of the Rosetta Plasma Consortium suite of sensors (RPC-MAG), whose measurements were already used to demonstrate that the comet nucleus is not magnetised. However, since Rosetta’s comet is much less active than Comet Halley, the scientists predicted that a diamagnetic cavity could form only in the months around perihelion – the closest point to the Sun on the comet’s orbit – but that it would extend only 50–100 km from the nucleus. During 2015, the increased amounts of dust dragged into space by the outflowing gas became a significant problem for navigation close to the comet. To keep Rosetta safe, trajectories were chosen such that by the end of July 2015, a few weeks before perihelion, it was some 170 km away from the nucleus. As a result, scientists considered that detecting signs of the magnetic field-free bubble would be impossible. “We had almost given up on Rosetta finding the diamagnetic cavity, so we were astonished when we eventually found it,” says Charlotte Götz of the Institute for Geophysics and extraterrestrial Physics in Braunschweig, Germany. Discovery of diamagnetic cavity Charlotte is the lead author of a new study, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, presenting the detection of a diamagnetic cavity obtained by RPC-MAG on 26 July. The paper describes one of the most spectacular measurements from almost 700 detections of regions with no magnetic field made by Rosetta at the comet since June 2015. “We were able to detect the cavity, and on many occasions, because it is much bigger and dynamic than we had expected,” adds Charlotte. To investigate why the magnetic field-free cavity is so much bigger than predicted, Charlotte and her colleagues looked at measurements performed around the same time by other instruments, such as Rosetta's scientific camera, OSIRIS, and the Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis instrument, ROSINA, to verify whether any anomalous changes in the comet's activity could be pushing the cavity away from the nucleus. While one of the cavity detections, on 29 July, occurred in conjunction with a strong outburst of gas and dust recorded by other instruments on Rosetta, this seems to be an isolated case. Almost all of the other observations of magnetic field-free regions, including the one recorded on 26 July, were not accompanied by any appreciable increase of outgassing. Comet on 26 July 2015 “To account for such a big cavity in the simulations, we would need the outgassing rate to be 10 times higher than was measured at the comet by ROSINA,” says co-author Karl-Heinz Glassmeier from Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, principal investigator of RPC-MAG. The most likely explanation seems to lie, instead, in the dynamical nature of the cavity boundary. Boundaries between plasma regions with different properties are often unstable, and small oscillations can arise in the pile-up region of the solar wind, where it encounters the magnetic field-free region, on the Sun-facing side of the comet. If these oscillations propagate and get amplified along the boundary, in the direction opposite the Sun, they could easily cause the cavity to grow in size. Such a moving instability would also explain why the measurements of magnetic field-free regions are sporadic and mainly span several minutes, with the 26 July one lasting 25 minutes and the longest one, recorded in November, about 40 minutes. The short duration of the detections is not a result of Rosetta crossing the cavity – the spacecraft moves much too slowly with respect to the comet – but of the magnetic field-free regions repeatedly passing through the spacecraft. “What we are seeing is not the main part of the cavity but the smaller pockets at the cavity boundary, which are occasionally pushed farther away from the nucleus by the waves propagating along the boundary,” adds Charlotte. Scientists are now busy analysing all the magnetic field-free events recorded by Rosetta, to learn more about the properties of the plasma in the comet environment and its interaction with the solar wind. After perihelion, as the comet moved away from the Sun and its outgassing and dust production rate declined, the spacecraft was able to move closer to the nucleus, and the magnetometer continued detecting magnetic field-free regions for several months, until the latest detection in February 2016. Comet Halley close up “Three decades ago, Giotto’s detection at Comet Halley was a great success, because it was the first confirmation of the existence of a diamagnetic cavity at a comet,” says Matt Taylor, Rosetta Project Scientist at ESA. “But that was only one measurement, while now we have seen the cavity at Rosetta’s comet come and go hundreds of times over many months. This is why Rosetta is there, living with the comet and studying it up close.”
16-year time-lapse film of stars orbiting Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. One of the best depictions yet of indirect visualization of a black hole.
Ron Baalke @RonBaalke 10m10 minutes ago 30 years ago today (1986), Giotto flew by Halley's Comet & took the best closeup images. @RealCometHalley
NASA to test fire in space by burning unmanned orbiting craft March 16, 2016 The fire experiment will be conducted in an Orbital ATK Cygnus capsule after the craft ferries supplies to the International Space Station NASA said it will test the effects of a large fire in space by setting off a blaze inside an orbiting unmanned space craft. NASA has set off tiny controlled fires in space in the past, but never tested how large flames react inside aspace capsule in space. This research "is crucial for the safety of current and future space missions," Gary Ruff, one of the engineers heading the experiment at the US space agency's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, said Tuesday. The goal is to measure the size of the flames, how quickly they spread, the heat output, and how much gas is emitted. The experiment will be conducted in an Orbital ATK Cygnus capsule after the craft ferries supplies to the International Space Station. The Cygnus capsule is scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop an Atlas 5 rocket on its final mission on March 23. Once the capsule undocks from the ISS and is far away from the space station, ground control will trigger the fire on board, Ruff said. The results of this experiment, dubbed Saffire-1, will determine how much fire resistance is needed in the ultra-light material used in the spacecraft and the astronaut's gear. It will also help NASA build better fire detection and suppression systems for their spaceships, and study how microgravity and limited amounts of oxygen affect the size of the flames. "Understanding fire in space has been the focus of many experiments over the years," said Ruff. While many "small, centimeter-sized fires have been lit in space before, to really understand fire, you've got to look at a more realistic size." Temperature, oxygen and carbon dioxide sensors will record data on the fire, which is expected to last about 20 minutes, in real time. Cameras also will film the material as it burns. A few days after the blaze, NASA expects the remnants of the Cygnus capsule to plunge towards Earth and disintegrate in the atmosphere.
https://interfacelift.com/wallpaper/details/4020/jet_in_carina.html A 3-light-year-long pillar, bathed in the glow of light from hot, massive stars to the top of the image. Scorching radiation and fast winds (streams of charged particles) from these stars are sculpting the pillar and causing new stars to form within it. Streamers of gas and dust can be seen flowing off the top of the structure. Nestled inside this dense structure are fledgling stars. They cannot be seen in this image because they are hidden by a wall of gas and dust. Although the stars themselves are invisible, one of them is providing evidence of its existence. Thin puffs of material can be seen traveling to the left and to the right of a dark notch in the center of the pillar. The matter is part of a jet produced by a young star. Farther away, on the left, the jet is visible as a grouping of small, wispy clouds. A few small clouds are visible at a similar distance on the right side of the jet. Astronomers estimate that the jet is moving at speeds of up to 850,000 miles an hour. The jet's total length is about 10 light-years. Composed of gas and dust, the pillar resides in a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina.
Comet's Close Brush With Earth Seen in Radar Images By Alyssa Newcomb Mar 28, 2016, 9:44 AM ET PlayNASA/JPL-Caltech/GSSR WATCH Comet's Close Brush With Earth Seen in Radar Images NASA has released incredible radar images showing what a comet looked like as it hurtled past Earth last week, making it the third closest brush in recorded history, according to the space agency. At its closest pass, the irregularly shaped Comet P/2016 BA14 was 2.2 million miles away from Earth -- a considerably safe distance but also close enough for scientists using the Goldstone Solar System Radar in California to get a stunning look as the mammoth object zoomed past our planet. "We were able to obtain very detailed radar images of the comet nucleus over three nights around the time of closest approach," Shantanu Naidu, a researcher at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory said in a statement about the March 22 flyby. Naidu said researchers were able to observe the comet's shape in stunning detail, including topographic features and its bizarre shape, described as looking like a brick on one side and a pear on the other. The images capture details as small as eight meters per pixel, according to NASA. Researchers were also able to glean some insight into the comet's behavior, noting from radar images that it appears to spin around its axis once every 35 to 40 hours.