The ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has officially discovered 5000 comets. Comet number 5000 was spotted in SOHO images on March 25, 2024. Full Story: https://www.space.com/soho-sun-observatory-5000-comet-discovery
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)
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)
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TechTranscript
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 of 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.
00:25It'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 and they download those images.
01:09And it's really as simple as looking through them, flicking through the image and looking 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.
01:44The 5,000 comet milestone is a huge achievement. It's one that none of us dreamed we would even get to.
01:51So simply the statistics of 5,000 comets and looking at their orbits and trajectories through space is a super unique data set.
02:02It's a really valuable science and 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. It's 20 or more years of invaluable discoveries from the project volunteers.
02:42NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology