Context: 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.
Key Points

• The comet, which was discovered by NASA’s Near Earth Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope in March.
• Star gazers in India will be able to catch a glimpse of the C/2020 F3 comet, also dubbed NEOWISE, from July 14 onwards as it soars across the solar system.
• The comet will be visible to the naked eye for around 20 minutes everyday for 20 days and expected to come closest to Earth on July 22-23.
• 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.

About Comets

• Comets or Dirty Snowballs are mostly made of dust, rocks and ice, the remnants from time the solar system was formed over 4.6 billion years ago.
• The word comet comes from the Latin word ‘Cometa’ which means ‘long-haired’ and the earliest known record of a comet sighting was made by an astrologer in 1059 BC.
• Comets can range in their width from a few miles to tens of miles wide.
• As they orbit closer to the sun, they heat up and release debris of dust and gases that forms into a glowing head that can often be larger than a planet.
• The debris forms a tail that can stretch out to millions of miles.
• Each time a comet passes the sun, it loses some of its material and it will eventually disappear completely as a result.
• Comets do not have light of their own and what humans are able to see from Earth is the reflection of the sun’s light off the comet as well as the energy released by the gas molecules after it is absorbed from the sun.

About Near-Earth Objects (NEOs)

• Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits which allows them to enter the Earth’s neighbourhood.
• These objects are composed mostly of water ice with embedded dust particles.
• NEOs occasionally approach close to the Earth as they orbit the Sun.