NASA’s multiple scientific assets on and around Mars put in it in the perfect position to observe the recent passing of the comet Siding Spring, a recently discovered comet making its first trip into our Solar System.

Siding Spring comes from the Oort Cloud, a ring of icy bodies far beyond the planets and effects of our Sun. The comet was discovered in 2013 by Robert McNaught with the Uppsala Southern Schmidt Telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia and observers said they were excited to get data on the newly-discovered comet, which is believed to be close the same condition that it was in back when it was originally formed.

“Siding Spring probably got knocked into the inner Solar System by the passage of a star near the Oort Cloud,” Carey Lisse, an astrophysicist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told BBC News. “So think about a comet that started to travel probably at the dawn of man and it’s just now coming in.”

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was probably in the best position to capture images of the 3,300-foot-wide comet, also known as C/2013 A1. Other NASA satellites orbiting Mars gathered information on Siding Spring’s gas-and-dust atmosphere, also called the coma. As the comet gets closer to the Sun, the coma will extend out into a long tail.

NASA’s two Martian surface rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity, were tasked with capturing pictures of Siding Spring as it zoomed past the Red Planet at a speed of about 125,000 miles per hour. If the rovers weren’t able to capture an image of the comet – they may have been able to catch evidence of material streaming from the comet and causing ‘shooting stars’ in the upper atmosphere as it heated up.

NASA scientists are expected to announce their findings on Siding Spring in the coming days.