COMETS Comets have been witnessed ever since man has been speculating about objects in the nighttime sky and appear in records from the beginning of recorded civilization (Schweighauser 20). Comets are made up of four distinct features. The first is the nucleus. The nucleus is made up of frozen gases, mostly water vapor with lesser amounts of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, and imbedded in the frozen gases are interplanetary dust and tiny fragments of stony and metallic meteoric material. Some comets, the larger ones, have a nucleus of 10 kilometers (Schweighauser 22). The second feature of comets is the coma.