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 Sun Grazer Project, we had less than a thousand comets, that was
00:04over 20 years ago.
00:06So the fact that we've finally reached this milestone, 5,000 comets, is just unbelievable
00:12to me.
00:13The Sun Grazer Project is a project that allows anyone anywhere in the world to sit down with
00:20a 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 Sun Grazer Project relies exclusively on images of the sun from the spacecraft.
00:36And the images that we discover nearly all of our comets in come from the Solar and Heliospheric
00:42Observatory, or SOHO.
00:45That is a satellite that was launched in 1995, so it's been operating for a long time now.
00:50Three, two, one, ignition and liftoff of SOHO and the Atlas vehicle on an international
00:58mission of solar physics.
01:01Our participants go to the SOHO website where we have all of our latest images from the
01:07spacecraft, and they download those images.
01:09And it's really as simple as looking through them, flicking through the image, and looking
01:14for something tiny and faint and moving in a different direction to the stars.
01:20So, discovering 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
01:30the universe that no one has ever seen before.
01:33Prior to the launch of the SOHO mission and the Sun Grazer Project, there were only a couple
01:40of dozen sun grazing comets on record.
01:43That's all we knew existed.
01:44The 5,000 Comet Milestone is a huge achievement.
01:48It'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
01:58space is a super unique dataset.
02:03It's a really valuable science.
02:04And it is just a testament to the countless hours the project participants have put into
02:12this.
02:13We absolutely would not, under any circumstance, be here if it wasn't for what our project volunteers
02:19have done.
02:20That's really what 5,000 comets represents.
02:23It's 20 or more years of invaluable discoveries from the project volunteers.
02:39Thanks for joining us.
02:43Thanks, all for talking to the population.
02:46We have a great idea.
02:51We're going to try this out.