When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
The sungrazing comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) has been causing a stir in recent months as it brightened during its headlong rush towards the sun, which culminates in a high stakes close approach known to astronomers as perihelion on April 4. Here's how you can watch its final do-or-die approach for yourself through the technological eye of a sungazing spacecraft.
C/2026 A1 (MAPS) is thought to belong to the Kreutz family of comets — enigmatic solar system wanderers that are thought to have a shared progenitor and whose orbits take them perilously close to our parent star.
At perihelion, C/2026 A1 (MAPS) is expected to pass just 101,100 miles (162,700 km) from the sun's photosphere — a passage that could either spell its doom as volatiles buried beneath its surface vaporize and undermine its integrity, or may even see it shine bright enough to appear in the daytime sky.
Either way, you may be able to spot the wandering solar system body as it careens towards the sun in imagery captured by the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraphy (LASCO) mounted on the joint ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.
LASCO was designed to take detailed images of the sun's atmosphere by blocking out the light coming directly from its surface. Each of SOHO's "C3'" images captures a field of view 32 times the diameter of the sun, revealing how material ejected from its surface interacts with the space environment and, occasionally, detecting the presence of interlopers, such as C/2026 A1 (MAPS).
Space.com columnist Joe Rao forecast that comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) will enter the LASCO instrument's field of view from 8:00 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT) on April 2 through to 1:00 a.m. EDT (0500 GMT) on April 6. It will briefly disappear as it passes into the blind spot created by the instrument's occulter disk for the four hours surrounding periohelion, before emerging back into LASCO's field of view, assuming it survives the close brush with our parent star.
LATEST POSTS
- 1
Birds Will Flock To Your Birdbath When You Plant These Two Flowers Around It - 2IVE 2026 'Show What I Am' Tour: How to get tickets, prices, dates and more
- 3Whale stranded off Germany for days is stuck again
- 4Eleven arrested over mass shooting in South Africa tavern
- 510 Setting up camp Shelters That Offer Both Excellence and Isolation
- Shredded cheese sold in dozens of states recalled due to potential for metal fragment contamination
- Geminid meteor shower, one of the year's most reliable, peaks this weekend
- Invigorating Spots To Go Kayaking All over The Planet
- Huge rotating structure of galaxies and dark matter is detected
- Met Gala 2026 will celebrate fashion as an 'embodied art form': A guide to the theme, dress code, cochairs and hosting committee of the starry event
- 4 Jeep Models: Dominating Execution and Flexibility for Each Experience
- The Benefits of Effective money management for Your Youngsters' Future Monetary Prosperity
- I binged all 24 Hallmark Christmas movies in less than 30 days. I emerged a changed man.
- This is Countdown, CNN’s newsletter covering NASA’s first time sending humans to deep space in over 50 years
