14 DAY TRIAL // Comet ISON, also known as C/2012 S1, will reach its perihelion – its point of closest approach to the Sun – later today, November 28. Ahead of this event, which may very well allow us to witness the comet's destruction, NASA and the European Space Agency used one of their joint missions to capture a new image of ISON drawing ever closer to the Sun.
The NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission is a spacecraft that has been studying the Sun and space weather since 1995. It features about a dozen scientific instruments, which allow it to look at our parent star in multiple wavelengths.
This photo, called a coronagraph, is obtained by using a disk to block out the main light coming from the Sun. This allows SOHO to investigate secondary structures on the star, coronal mass ejections, and other phenomena.
Comet ISON is scheduled to fly past the Sun later today. This close approach could very well destroy it, astronomer say, since the object will fly just 1,860,000 kilometers (1,150,000 miles) from the center of the Sun, which means 1,165,000 kilometers (724,000 miles) above the star's surface.