Cosmonaut Video: Farewell Wishes to Comet C/2025 R3 | International Space Station
Expedition 74 station commander and cosmonaut Sergey-Kud Sverchkov: "A Traveler We'll Never See Again. Have you ever seen a comet with your own eyes? Until last week, I hadn't. If you look closely, you can see a small bright dot with a long trail in the center of the image. That's comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS). This comet came to us from the Oort Cloud—a hypothetical distant region surrounding the Solar System, extending from 2,000 AU to 50,000 AU (AU = astronomical unit, equal to the distance from the Sun to Earth. For example, the distance from the Sun to Uranus is 19.2 AU). Objects from the formation of the Solar System still exist there, making them very interesting to scientists. Visitors from this region have orbits that allow them to spend most of their time outside our solar system and can have orbital periods of thousands or millions of years. According to some calculations, our wanderer has an orbital period of about 160,000 years, while others suggest it has an open parabolic trajectory, meaning it will never return. On April 26, it will pass 73 million km from Earth, and this was the only chance for living Earthlings to see it."
Discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey in September 2025, the comet dived toward its closest approach to the Sun (0.50 AU) on April 19, 2026, bringing it well inside the orbit of planet Venus.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/
Station Commander: Sergey-Kud Sverchkov (Russia)
Roscosmos (Russia) Flight Engineers: Andrey Fedyaev, Sergei Mikaev
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada.
Duration: 1 minute
Release Date: April 22, 2026 (EDT)
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