From: Paul Doherty (pauld@exploratorium.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 18 2002 - 12:09:09 PDT
Message-Id: <l0311071fb8e4ca50de11@[192.174.3.125]> Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 12:09:09 -0700 From: Paul Doherty <pauld@exploratorium.edu> Subject: DISCOVER A COMET WHILE ON THE INTERNET WITH SOHO
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>Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 14:30:14 -0400 (EDT)
>From: NASANews@hq.nasa.gov
>Subject: DISCOVER A COMET WHILE ON THE INTERNET WITH SOHO
>Sender: owner-press-release@lists.hq.nasa.gov
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>
>Dolores Beasley
>Headquarters, Washington April 18, 2002
>(Phone: 202/358-1753)
>
>Bill Steigerwald
>Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
>(Phone: 301/286-5017
>
>RELEASE: 02-71
>
>DISCOVER A COMET WHILE ON THE INTERNET WITH SOHO
>
> A new comet was discovered over the Internet by a
>Chinese amateur astronomer visiting the website for the Solar
>and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. The comet
>"C/2002 G3 (SOHO)" was first reported on Friday, April 12, by
>XingMing Zhou of BoLe city, in the XinJiang province of
>China, who discovered the comet while watching SOHO real-time
>images of the Sun on the Internet. The comet is a new comet,
>not belonging to any known group.
>
>SOHO, launched over six years ago as a project of
>international cooperation between the European Space Agency
>(ESA) and NASA, has discovered more than 420 comets in just
>under six years. This makes the spacecraft the most prolific
>comet finder in the history of astronomy. Most of the comets
>were first spotted by amateurs around the world who
>downloaded SOHO's real-time images to their home computers.
>Anyone with Internet access can take part in the hunt for new
>comets and be a comet discoverer.
>
>"From September 2000 to now I have been trying to find SOHO
>comets, and I've discovered 13 comets, one of which,
>designated '2001U9' and initially cataloged by the SOHO
>project as 'SOHO-367,' was the brightest one in the last two
>years," said Zhou, who previously spent more than 1,600 hours
>since his 1985 graduation scanning the heavens with his 15cm
>F/5.3 reflector telescope to discover a single comet.
>
>"What's exciting about these near-sun comets is that we are
>exploring a population of comets that has never been seen
>before because they are very small and faint," said Douglas
>Biesecker, a solar physicist with L3 Com Analytics
>Corporation, Vienna, Va. "By the time their orbits take them
>close to the Sun so they become bright, they are lost in the
>Sun's glare and require a space-based coronagraph like that
>on SOHO to be seen." Biesecker, who is affiliated with the
>SOHO program at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
>Greenbelt, Md., confirms potential comet discoveries as they
>are posted to the SOHO website.
>
>C/2002 G3 (SOHO) will be visible in SOHO's Large Angle and
>Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) C3 images until Saturday,
>April 20. The comet was first visible late in the day on
>Thursday, April 11. It entered the field of view at the
>bottom edge, almost directly under the Sun. It is moving
>upward to the left, and will eventually move back toward the
>right, exiting from the LASCO C3 field of view at the top
>edge, to the right of the Sun. First cataloged by the SOHO
>project as "SOHO-422," it has been officially designated
>C/2002 G3 (SOHO) by the International Astronomical Union.
>
>The comet reached the point closest to the Sun in its orbit
>on April 17 at about 1:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, at a
>distance of about 7.6 million miles (12.3 million
>kilometers). As the week goes on, the comet will move through
>the field of view more quickly.
>
>In all these images, the shaded disk is a mask in the
>instrument that blots out direct sunlight, making faint
>comets and the dim outer atmosphere of the Sun, or the
>corona, visible. The white circle added within the disk shows
>the size and position of the visible Sun.
>
>Solar radiation heats the comet, which in turn causes the
>outgassing of its water molecules and dust. The dust scatters
>sunlight at visible wavelengths, making the comet bright in
>LASCO images. The water molecules break down into oxygen and
>hydrogen atoms, and the hydrogen atoms interact with the
>coronal plasma (electrified gas that comprises the extended
>atmosphere of the Sun).
>
>All the SOHO images are freely available on the SOHO web
>site:
>http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
>
>More information about sun-grazing comets and how to spot new
>ones can be found at:
>http://sungrazer.nascom.nasa.gov/
>Images and movies of the comet's passage are available at:
>http://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/2002_04_15/
> -end-
>
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