40 years ago a planet-killing comet came out of nowhere and left brown spots in the undergarments of our "enlightened" ones

"Forty years ago, there came a show stopping celestial sight — literally a bolt out of the blue.

A brand-new comet, that for several days made headlines around the world due to its exceptionally close passage near the Earth: A distance amounting to less than 3 million miles (4.8 million km), or about 12 times the distance of the Earth to the moon.

In fact, when the comet was first sighted on April 25, 1983, it was not with human eyes or a telescope , but from a satellite: IRAS, the acronym for InfraRed Astronomical Satellite, launched from the then-Vandenberg Air Force Base the previous January and placed in a 560-mile (900 km) orbit around Earth. The satellite was a joint undertaking by Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States and was the first space telescope to perform a survey of the entire sky at infrared wavelengths. Its main purpose was to catalog the heat 'signatures' of asteroids as well as to observe the processes involved in the birth and death of stars.

When the IRAS satellite picked up on a fast-moving object on April 25, it was first assumed that it was an asteroid. But then, just over a week later on May 3, Japanese amateur astronomer Genichi Araki reported the discovery of a new comet in the constellation of Draco the Dragon to the Tokyo Observatory. This was followed by an observation made by George Alcock, a well-known British comet observer, who was scanning the sky with 15 x 80 binoculars. Amazingly, Alcock — who had previous discovered four other comets — was inside his house and looking through a closed window, when he stumbled across the comet that Araki had sighted just seven hours before..." [less than 50%]

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