COMET ISON's sun dive climax: RENDEZVOUS with DESTINY

Imagery shows iceball buffeted by solar belch

Vid - Updated NASA has released a nifty video of Comet Ison as it makes its way inexorably towards its closest encounter with the Sun in just over three hours now at 18:44 GMT, 28 November.

Made up of pictures from the Heliospheric Imager of the agency's STEREO-A (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft, snapped between 20 and 25 November, the vid demonstrates the icy ball's dogged determination to reach perihelion largely intact.

Ison still faces possible disintegration or a serious roasting as it passes the Sun. A tail-stripping coronal mass ejection (CME) is also a threat, and hot-off-the-press STEREO images, assembled into a video by Brain Candy, shows the comet (bottom left) taking a serious pasting earlier today from an mighty solar belch:

If it survives its rollercoaster ride around the Sun, Ison should emerge for Earthlings' viewing pleasure in early December. Quite how impressive it turns out to be remains to be seen. ®