In The Sky at Night on 18 October 1986, Patrick had the honour of revealing a close-up image of a comet’s nucleus for the first time on television. Throughout the year, the show, and the world, had been following the progress of Halley’s Comet as it returned to the inner Solar System for the first time since the dawn of the Space Age.
With several space agencies keen to take advantage of the opportunity, a fleet of spacecraft known as Halley’s Armada were racing to visit the comet. The Soviet Union sent two Vega probes, while Japan sentat a speed of 245,000km/h. It came within just 596km of the comet, close enough to fly through the cloud of ice and dust which made Halley’s glorious tail. When Giotto was just 7.6 seconds from closest approach, it was stuck by an ice fragment. Though this weighed only a gram, the huge speed was enough to send the spacecraft spinning.
