A comet came 10-times closer to Mars yesterday than a comet has ever came to Earth, which, in turn, is helping scientists learn about the solar system's birth 4.6 billion years ago.
The Sliding Spring comet passed Mars about 87,000 miles away from the surface of the planet, reports Daily Mail.
It's believed that Sliding Spring was part of the early solar system 4.5 billion years ago and has remains relitvely unaltered, reports Daily Mail. This excites scientists who could get a better insight of the workings of the early solar system from studying Sliding Spring.
"It's awesome. It's such a ridiculously close approach to the planet," Karl Battams, an astrophysicist and comet expert at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, tells CBS News. "We've got these fantastic spacecraft out at Mars ... It's an extraordinary coincidence, and I think we're very lucky to see it. It could well be we don't see anything like it again in our lifetimes."
Spacecrafts launched from countries around the world, two surface rovers and five orbiters caught close pictures of Sliding Spring.
The spacecrafts at Mars were not intended or designed for looking at comets, but Battams tells CBS News any images of the Siding Spring picked up from the spacecrafts will be useful because it is the first Oort Cloud comet ever to be observed at relatively close range with modern technology.
"Think about a comet that started its travel probably at the dawn of man and it's just coming in close now," Dr. Carey Lisse, a senior astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, tells Daily Mail. "And the reason we can actually observe it is because we have built satellites and rovers."
