NASA has released video images of a comet making a spectacular suicide dive into the Sun earlier this month after its demise was watched by a fleet of spacecraft. 

View of comet from SoHo (ESA/NASA)

SoHo – the solar and Heliospheric Observatory jointly operated by Europe and the U.S. – was first to see the comet as it approached the Sun. It grew a long bright tail before it disappeared from view behind an opaque disk protecting the cameras from the Sun’s glare.

The comet, a chunk of rock and ice left over from the formation of the Solar System, is thought to have vaporised in the encounter. It has been rated as among the top ten comets among more than 2,000 seen by SoHo to graze the Sun since its launch in 1995.

NASA’s twin Stereo probes also watched from other angles as the comet made its death plunge. It was identified as one of a type called a Kreutz sungrazer, a fragment of a once giant comet that disintegrated in the distant past, at least 2,000 years ago, probably due to a close flyby of the Sun.

These cometary remains are named after Heinrich Kreutz, a 19th century German astronomer who studied several sungrazers and identified them as having a common origin.

Unusually, space scientists got a special view of this comet crash thanks to their latest Sun probe, the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Its high-resolution scans of the solar disk showed the comet flying above the visible surface, occasionally flaring brighter than the background activity.

No comet has ever been seen so close to the Sun before, though in March 2010 another Kreutz sungrazer was observed to suffer a similar fate using SoHo’s coronograph.

Here is NASA’s video report on the death of the comet, from YouTube.