Comet Near Earth Continues to Break Up

Periodic comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 has now broken into more than 30 different pieces as it approaches the Sun, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory report.

The comet, discovered May 2, 1930, by Arnold Schwassmann and Arno Wachmann at the Hamburg Observatory in Germany, was the third periodic comet discovered by the pair and the 73rd comet to be recognized as periodic.

Because of poor observing conditions, the comet was not recovered during its next return to perihelion in 1935-1936. As a result, calculations of the comet's orbit were rough and its close passes by Jupiter in October 1953, at 0.9 AU, and November 1965, at 0.25 AU, further degraded astronomers' predictions.

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