Mariner 4 mystery solved?

[Blue Fire]

Anybody remember back to the mid 60's when Mariner 4 was all the rage? (Yeah, I know, now I'm dating myself) I even remember some of the last debates about the canals on Mars! ... and how Mariner 4 blew those myths out of the water.

Anyway, when Mariner finally started drifting off after having run out of fuel, it apparently got clobbered by some mysterious meteor storm:

"For about 45 minutes the spacecraft experienced a shower of meteoroids more intense than any Leonid meteor storm we've ever seen on Earth," according to Bill Cooke, the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. The impacts ripped away bits of insulation and temporarily changed the craft's orientation in space. "It was a complete surprise."

And then:

For almost 40 years the source of the shower remained a mystery. But now, meteor expert Paul Weigert of the University of Western Ontario may have cracked the case. The culprit, he believes, is a "dark comet" named D/1895 Q1 (Swift) or "D/Swift" for short.

"Comet D/Swift was first seen in August 1895 by the prolific comet hunter Lewis A. Swift," says Weigert. Swift discovered or co-discovered more than a dozen comets, including 109P/Swift-Tuttle, the source of the well-known Perseid meteor shower. Unlike his other comets, however, "D/Swift quickly vanished. The comet was last spotted in February 1896 heading out of the inner Solar System, and it has never been seen since, even though its orbit indicates it should come back and brighten every 5 years or so."

Ya lean something new every day, at least I do... re D for Dark comet.

What happened to D/Swift? "The comet may have disintegrated," says Weigert. Comets are notoriously fragile and sometimes a little sunlight is all it takes to make them crumble. Comet D/Swift probably overheated when it passed by the sun in 1895 and later fell apart.

To make a long story short, Weigert made the positional calculations and found that the comet (possibly broken up, and so Dark) was within about 20 million miles of Mariner 4, close by solar system standards. But of course the comet's orbit was not known precisely, so this is a guestimate which Weigert plans to refine with more research.

So, another mystery solved? ... Maybe? What I found interesting also was that Hubble had photographed 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 falling apart in April 2006. No wonder I couldn't spot that dumb thing in my 12 power binocs.

I just think it's so cool that some astronomers never give up on a good mystery. And this one's 40 years old!