NASA discovered comet to shine past Earth this weekend

A comet just discovered last year by observers will whizz past Earth from 44 million miles away but leave a trail of dust and gases visible to the naked eye, NASA said.

Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas will make its closest approach to Earth on Saturday and won’t be back for about 80,000 years, the space agency said. It is about two miles in diameter and its tail extends millions of miles.

Bill Cooke, of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said the comet will appear in the sky like a fireball.

“It’s not going to zing across the sky like a meteor,” Cooke said. “It will just appear to hang there, and it will slowly change position from night to night. If you can see [the comet] with your unaided eye, [using] the binoculars will knock your socks off.”

It was discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory in China and the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, ATLAS, telescope in South Africa. Scientists believe the comet was formed from the Oort Cloud, a spherical shell that surrounds the solar system.

“Bright comets are very rare and are usually newcomers to the inner solar system,” Cooke said.