When I began with the Sungrazer Project, we had less than a thousand comets.
That was over 20 years ago.
So, the fact that we’ve finally reached this milestone – 5,000 comets –
it’s just unbelievable to me.
Sungrazer Project is a project that allows anyone
anywhere in the world to sit down with a laptop and discover comets.
The clue to what a sungrazing comet is kind of in the name there:
it's literally a comet that grazes by the Sun.
The Sungrazer Project relies exclusively on images of the Sun
from spacecraft. And the images that we discover
nearly all of our comets in come from
the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO.
That is a satellite that was launched in 1995.
So, it's been operating for a long time now.
3, 2, 1 –
ignition and liftoff!
Of SOHO and the Atlas vehicle
on an international mission of solar physics.
Our participants go to the SOHO website
where we have all of our latest images from the spacecraft.
And they download those images.
And it's really as simple as looking through them, flicking through the images
and looking for something
tiny and faint and moving in a different direction to the stars.
Discovering a comet is a
very unique feeling.
You have this realization that suddenly you've found a piece of the solar system,
a piece of the universe that no one has ever seen before.
Prior to the launch of the SOHO mission and the Sungrazer Project,
there were only a couple of dozen sungrazing comets on record.
That's all we knew existed.
The 5,000-comet milestone is a huge achievement.
It’s one that none of us dreamed we would even get to.
So, simply the statistics of 5,000 comets and looking at their orbits
and trajectories through space is a super unique dataset.
It's a really valuable science, and it is just a testament to the countless hours
the project participants have put into this.
We absolutely would not under any circumstance be here
if it wasn't for what our project volunteers have done.
That's really what 5,000 comets represents.
It's 20 or more years of invaluable discoveries from the project volunteers.