C/2013 A1

C/2013 A1 ( Siding Spring ) is a comet from the Oort Cloud, which was discovered on January 3, 2013 by Robert H. McNaught at the Siding Spring Observatory using a Schmidt telescope. Subsequently, it was detected that the December 8, 2012 images were taken by the Catalina Sky Survey. At the time of its discovery, the comet was 7.2 AU from the Sun.

Probability of a felled on Mars

A preliminary orbit determination from observations showing until February 25, 2013, that there is a slight chance that the comet on October 19, 2014 strikes on Mars. According to initial investigations, a diameter of up to 50 km showed a high relative speed of 56 km / s With these properties, a possible impact would be on Mars, according to information provided by the JPL- NASA laboratories set an energy of 24 trillion megatons of TNT, and they produce a crater with a diameter of about 500 km. A little later on, after more detailed observations, the diameter has been reduced to 1-3 km. The impact energy would in this case have an equivalent of about 35 million megatons of TNT. According to JPL then the resulting crater would have a diameter of 45 "only" - have 71 km. The instantaneous probability of an impact is 1:2000.

According to the " database for small objects" (SBD ) of JPL Laboratory of NASA can be the probability of an impact of C/2013 A1 now after 244 days of observation excluded almost completely. However, the analysis of trajectory data still showed an exceptionally close passage: Thus, the comet is the Mars on October 19, 2014 happen at an average distance of only 122,000 km with a maximum possible approximation up to 14,700 km; the maximum distance will now be given 240,000 km.