Travelers In The Night

My team was excited when our Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls discovered his first comet, C/2017 D1 (Fuls), when it was traveling between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter about 257 million miles from Earth. It is classified as a Jupiter Family Comet and orbits the Sun once every ten and a half years on a path that keeps it hundreds of million miles from both the Earth and Sun. It is likely that Carson's comet originally had an orbit out in the Kuiper belt far beyond Pluto.Comet Fuls was directed into our vicinity when its original path was changed by a collision with another object or perhaps because of the gravitational tug of passing star. A Jupiter family comet like Carson's orbit is unstable due to the gravitational pulls of the planets especially the giant Jupiter