[FOTZeiss] Fw: SOHO Spots 2000th Comet

[Glenn A. Walsh]

FYI

gaw

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--- On Sun, 1/2/11, Ron Baalke <baalke at ZAGAMI.JPL.NASA.GOV> wrote:

> From: Ron Baalke <baalke at ZAGAMI.JPL.NASA.GOV>
> Subject: SOHO Spots 2000th Comet
> To: HASTRO-L at listserv.wvu.edu
> Date: Sunday, January 2, 2011, 6:21 PM
> http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/soho/comet-2000.html
> 
> SOHO Spots 2000th Comet
> Karen C. Fox
> NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
> December 28, 2010
> 
> As people on Earth celebrate the holidays and prepare to
> ring in the New
> Year, an ESA/NASA spacecraft has quietly reached its own
> milestone: on
> December 26, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)
> discovered
> its 2000th comet.
> 
> Drawing on help from citizen scientists around the world,
> SOHO has
> become the single greatest comet finder of all time. This
> is all the
> more impressive since SOHO was not specifically designed to
> find comets,
> but to monitor the sun.
> 
> "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.
> 
> Of course, it is not SOHO itself that discovers the comets
> -- that is
> the province of the dozens of amateur astronomer volunteers
> who daily
> pore over the fuzzy lights dancing across the pictures
> produced by
> SOHO's LASCO (or Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph)
> cameras.
> Over 70 people representing 18 different countries have
> helped spot
> comets over the last 15 years by searching through the
> publicly
> available SOHO images online.
> 
> The 1999th and 2000th comet were both discovered on
> December 26 by Michal Kusiak, an astronomy student at
> Jagiellonian
> University in Krakow, Poland. Kusiak found his first SOHO
> comet in
> November 2007 and has since found more than 100.
> 
> "There are a lot of people who do it," says Karl Battams
> who has been in
> charge of running the SOHO comet-sighting website since
> 2003 for the
> Naval Research Lab in Washington, where he also does
> computer processing
> for LASCO. "They do it for free, they're extremely
> thorough, and if it
> wasn't for these people, most of this stuff would never see
> the light of
> day."
> 
> Battams receives reports from people who think that one of
> the spots in
> SOHO's LASCO images looks to be the correct size and
> brightness and
> headed for the sun - characteristics typical of the comets
> SOHO finds.
> He confirms the finding, gives each comet an unofficial
> number, and then
> sends the information off to the Minor Planet Center in
> Cambridge, Mass,
> which categorizes small astronomical bodies and their
> orbits.
> 
> It took SOHO ten years to spot its first thousand comets,
> but only five
> more to find the next thousand. That's due partly to
> increased
> participation from comet hunters and work done to optimize
> the images
> for comet-sighting, but also due to an unexplained
> systematic increase
> in the number of comets around the sun. Indeed, December
> alone has seen
> an unprecedented 37 new comets spotted so far, a number
> high enough to
> qualify as a "comet storm."
> 
> LASCO was not designed primarily to spot comets. The LASCO
> camera blocks
> out the brightest part of the sun in order to better watch
> emissions in
> the sun's much fainter outer atmosphere, or corona. LASCO's
> comet
> finding skills are a natural side effect -- with the sun
> blocked, it's
> also much easier to see dimmer objects such as comets.
> 
> "But there is definitely a lot of science that comes with
> these comets,"
> says Battams. "First, now we know there are far more comets
> in the inner
> solar system than we were previously aware of, and that can
> tell us a
> lot about where such things come from and how they're
> formed originally
> and break up. We can tell that a lot of these comets all
> have a common
> origin." Indeed, says Battams, a full 85% of the comets
> discovered with
> LASCO are thought to come from a single group known as the
> Kreutz
> family, believed to be the remnants of a single large comet
> that broke
> up several hundred years ago.
> 
> The Kreutz family comets are "sungrazers" - bodies whose
> orbits approach
> so near the Sun that most are vaporized within hours of
> discovery - but
> many of the other LASCO comets boomerang around the sun and
> return
> periodically. One frequent visitor is comet 96P Machholz.
> Orbiting the
> sun approximately every six years, this comet has now been
> seen by SOHO
> three times.
> 
> SOHO is a cooperative project between the European Space
> Agency (ESA)
> and NASA. The spacecraft was built in Europe for ESA and
> equipped with
> instruments by teams of scientists in Europe and the USA.
> 
> For more information about the SOHO mission, visit:
> http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
> 
> Follow SOHO's comet findings more closely at:
> http://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/ or via Twitter at:
> http://twitter.com/SungrazerComets
>  
>