The 1,500th comet has been discovered by the ESA/NASA SOHO spacecraft, making it the most successful comet discoverer in all history. Considering that SOHO was designed specifically to be a solar physics mission, this is a fabulous record! SOHO’s record-breaking discovery was made on June 25th. The small and faint Kreutz-group comet was discovered by US-based veteran comet hunter and amateur astronomer Rob Matson. When it comes to comet catching, the SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has one big advantage over everybody else: its location. Situated between the Sun and Earth, it has a privileged view of a region of space that can rarely be seen from Earth. From the surface, we can see regions close to the Sun clearly only during an eclipse.
Roughly 85 percent of SOHO discoveries are fragments from a once-great comet that split apart in a death plunge around the Sun, probably many centuries ago. The fragments are known as the Kreutz group and now pass within 1.5 million km of the Sun’s surface when they return from deep space. At this proximity, which is a near miss in celestial terms, most of the fragments are finally destroyed, evaporated by the Sun’s fearsome radiation — within sight of SOHO’s electronic eyes. The images are captured by the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronograph (LASCO), one of 12 instruments on board SOHO.
