Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, monitors sun, expands comet discovery. Image Credit/ESA and NASA
With the help of a prolific Polish astronomy student, the joint NASA and European Solar and Heliospheric Observatory mission has detected its 2,000th comet, a pursuit the 15-year-old spacecraft accomplished with the help of dozens of citizen observers from around the world, the two space agencies announced.
SOHO was launched on Dec. 2, 1995 to monitor changing solar activities.
Michael Kusiak, student astronomer. Photo Credit/Marcin Kusiak
Michael Kusiak, an astronomy student at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and other citizen astronomers regularly scan the imagery to search for comets as they whip around the sun. On Dec. 26, Kusiak identified the 1,999th and 2,000th new comet using SOHO imagery.
Kusiak, alone, is credited with finding more than 100 of them since November 2007.
Though developed for quite another purpose, SOHO has turned out to be quite the comet hunter.
SOHO lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Dec. 2, 1995. Photo Credit/NASA
“Since it launched on December 2, 1995 to observe the sun, SOHO has more than doubled the number of comets for which orbits have been determined over the last three hundred years,” says Joe Gurman, the U.S. project scientist for SOHO at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
In all, more than 70 people from 18 countries have sifted through the spacecraft imagery to claim a comet discovery.