View Images Library Photos and Pictures. Hubble Witnesses an Asteroid Mysteriously Disintegrating-This series of images shows the asteroid P/2013 R3 breaking apart, as viewed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in 2013. This is the first time that such a body has been seen to undergo this kind of break-up. The Hubble observations showed that there are ten distinct objects, each with comet-like dust tails,...*Click for more. The Complex Ion Tail of Comet Lovejoy Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock and dust roughly the size of a small town. When a comet's orbit brings it close to the sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets. The dust and gases form a tail that stretches away from the sun for millions of kilometers (photo NASA) A sun-watching spacecraft just might fly through tail of Comet ATLAS in rare encounter | Space