The 5000th Comet Discovered Using Space-Based Sun Observatory

Space.com

The ESA/NASA  Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has officially discovered 5000 comets. Comet number 5000 was spotted in SOHO images.  Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Producer: Lacey Young (MORI Associates) Editor: Lacey Young (MORI Associates) Videographer: Joy Ng (National Institute of Aerospace) Advisor: Beth Anthony (MORI Associates) Scientist: Karl Battams (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory)

Transcript

00:00When I began with the Sungrazer project, we had less than a thousand comets, that was over 20 years ago.

00:06So the fact that we've finally reached this milestone, 5,000 comets, is just unbelievable to me.

00:13Sungrazer project is a project that allows anyone, anywhere in the world, to sit down with a laptop and discover comets.

00:22The clue to what a sun grazing comet is kind of in the name there, it's literally a comet that grazes by the sun.

00:28The Sungrazer project relies exclusively on images of the sun from spacecraft,

00:35and the images that we discover nearly all of our comets in, come from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO.

00:44That is a satellite that was launched in 1995, so it's been operating for a long time now.

00:513, 2, 1, ignition, and liftoff of SOHO and the Atlas vehicle on an international mission of solar physics.

01:01Our participants go to the SOHO website, where we have all of our latest images from the spacecraft,

01:08and they download those images, and it's really as simple as looking through them, flicking through the image,

01:14looking for something tiny and faint, and moving in a different direction to the stars.

01:21Discovering a comet is a very unique feeling.

01:25You have this realization that suddenly you've found a piece of the solar system, a piece of the universe, that no one has ever seen before.

01:33Prior to the launch of the SOHO mission and the Sungrazer project, there were only a couple of dozen sun grazing comets on record.

01:43That's all we knew existed.

01:45The 5,000 comet milestone is a huge achievement. It's one that none of us dreamed we would even get to.

01:52So simply the statistics of 5,000 comets and looking at their orbits and trajectories through space is a super unique data set.

02:03It's a really valuable science.

02:05And it is just a testament to the countless hours the project participants have put into this.

02:13We absolutely would not, under any circumstance, be here if it wasn't for what our project volunteers have done.

02:20That's really what 5,000 comets represents.

02:23It's 20 or more years of invaluable discoveries from the project volunteers.

02:35Music

02:39Beeping

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