The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped a series of photos of a comet soaring by Mars on Sunday, using a High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera in order to get the shots. The photos and the story were published earlier this week on the HiRISE blog, which is operated by professors and scientists at the University of Arizona.

The pictures were faint and of middling quality – 256 x 256 pixels, to be exact – but still caught the faint outline of the comet ISON as it moved past Mars and through the stars on a journey “into the inner Solar System.” The comet’s coma – the luminescent cloud surrounding the head and nucleus of the formation – is not terribly bright, and the pictures were taken from an estimated eight million miles away. However, scientists will be able to use the pictures to judge the size and movement of the comet and to predict its behavior in the future.

The HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance was scheduled to take a few more pictures of the ISON comet throughout the week, all in an effort to discern the size of the comet’s nucleus. The relatively low brightness of the coma in the pictures will be perfect for assessing the actual size of the comet, as it will give scientists a reasonable ability to discern which parts of the comet are ice and dust and which are simply gas illuminated by the sun.

As the comet gets closer to the sun, the coma will become brighter and brighter, making ISON easier to see from Earth, but significantly harder to study scientifically. ISON is expected to reach its shortest distance from the sun – approximately 724,000 miles away – on November 28 of this year.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been in space since 2005, studying the “surface, subsurface, and atmosphere” of Mars. The orbiter was supposed to take further photographs of ISON on October 1 and 2, but the HiRISE blog has shown no updates on the project since Sunday, questioning whether the orbiter’s mission has been disrupted by the government-wide shutdown currently taking place in Washington.

If that’s the case, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter certainly wouldn’t be the only space travel project impacted by the shutdown. NASA’s Maven, a new Mars orbiter scheduled to launch later this year, was granted an “emergency exemption” from the shutdown this morning, after project technicians had already lost three of the nine “margin days” allotted for the project.