The
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (
SOHO ) of ESA and NASA has discovered its
comet number 2000 , thus becoming the greatest comet hunter of all time. The most curious thing is that it was not designed for this purpose, but to study the physics of the Sun.? Since its launch on December 2, 1995 to observe the Sun, SOHO has doubled the number of comets whose orbits we know ,? explains Joe Gurman , SOHO project scientist at NASA. And it is because it is located between the Sun and the Earth, the probe enjoys a privileged view of a region of space that can rarely be seen from our planet. The images are captured by the
LASCO coronagraph (
Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronograph ), one of 12 instruments on board SOHO.
Seventy scientists from 18 countries have helped find these celestial bodies by analyzing images obtained by LASCO, which are publicly available on the Internet . "They do it for free, and if it weren't for them most of this material would never see the light of day," says Karl Battams, based at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, and responsible for the SOHO website since 2003.
Only in this month of December 37 new comets have been discovered.
