Painting by PSI Cofounder and Senior Scientist Emeritus William K. Hartmann As Siding Spring Comet passed by Mars on Oct. 19, 2014, it broke up in the atmosphere, creating a luminescent shower in the pre-dawn hours. The depiction is based on reports by astronomer Nick Schneider et al. (2015), a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters. The breakup of cometary meteors is based on work by Olga Popova, a Russian meteor entry expert. The image uses acrylic paint and integrates soil from Tucson, Arizona to create visible gravel-like textures on the surface of Mars.