Comet C/2020 F3 Neowise

The recently discovered comet called C/2020 F3, also known as NEOWISE after the NASA telescope that discovered it, will make its closest approach to the Earth on July 22. On the day, the comet, which takes 6,800 years to complete one lap around its orbit, will be at a distance of 64 million miles or 103 million kilometers while crossing Earth’s outside orbit.

What are comets?

• Comets or “dirty snowballs” are mostly made of dust, rocks and ice, the remnants from the time the solar system was formed over 4.6 billion years ago.
• They are thought to be remnants of the formation of the Solar System.
• In the distant past, people thought of comets as “long-haired” stars that would appear unpredictably in the sky.

NEOWISE Telescope

• The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer is a NASA infrared-wavelength astronomical space telescope launched in December 2009 and placed in hibernation mode in February 2011.
• In 2013, the spacecraft was reactivated and was renamed as NEOWISE.
• It was assigned a new mission in whom it helps to assist NASA’s efforts to identify and characterize the population of near-Earth objects (NEO).

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