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The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was designed to examine the Sun, but as a side benefit, it has been the most successful comet hunter ever built. Since early in the mission, citizen scientists have been scanning through the telescope\u2019s data, searching for icy objects passing close to the Sun. An astronomy student in Czechia has identified 200 comets in SOHO data since he started in 2009 at the age of 13. He recently spotted the observatory\u2019s 5,000th comet.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n \u201cPrior to the launch of the SOHO mission and the Sungrazer Project, there were only a couple dozen sungrazing comets on record \u2013 that\u2019s all we knew existed,\u201d said Karl Battams, who is the principal investigator for the Sungrazer Project, the citizen science project that was launched after so many comets started showing up in the data. \u201cThe fact that we\u2019ve finally reached this milestone \u2013 5000 comets \u2013 is just unbelievable to me.\u201d<\/p>\n SOHO moves around the Sun on the sunward side of Earth, where it enjoys a clear, uninterrupted view of the Sun, by slowly orbiting around Lagrange point L1. \u00a0That means it has been observing the Sun 24 hours a day, 365 days a year without interruptions since shortly after it launched in 1995. With this view, SOHO can easily spot the kind of comet that\u2019s known as a sungrazer \u2013 so named because of their close approach to the Sun. Many of these comets don\u2019t survive their close pass to the Sun.<\/p>\n