![]() There’s a Mysterious Purple Light in the Sky - It’s Named Steve As of late 2017, more than 3,400 comets have been found by SOHO, most of them by amateurs accessing SOHO real-time data via the Internet.Ĥ. Of course, it is not SOHO itself that discovers the comets - that is the province of the dozens of amateur astronomer volunteers who daily pore over the fuzzy lights dancing across the pictures produced by SOHO's Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph cameras. ![]() 2, 1995, SOHO has more than doubled the number of comets for which orbits have been determined over the last 300 years. But SOHO has another claim to fame: Drawing on help from citizen scientists around the world, SOHO has become the single greatest comet finder of all time. SOHO is the longest-lived heliophysics mission, and has provided a nearly continuous record of solar phenomena over a full magnetic cycle (two 11-year sunspot cycles). (Images Courtesy of Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.)įor more than 22 years, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has been keeping an eye on the Sun from space. These images of two sun-grazing comets racing towards the Sun on June 12, 1998, were acquired by the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO), aboard NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite. ![]() Astronomers have yet to search through most of it for planets. Since then, they have named it K2-138 and determined that it has a fifth planet - and perhaps even a sixth, according to the new paper.Īnother batch of 2017 Kepler data was recently uploaded to Exoplanet Explorers for citizen scientists to search through. On the final night of the three-day program, researchers announced the discovery of a four-planet system. It was featured on a program called Stargazing Live on the Australia Broadcasting Corporation. Thousands of citizen scientists got to work on Kepler data in 2017 when Exoplanet Explorers launched. This was the first multiplanet system discovered entirely through crowdsourcing, organized through a project called Exoplanet Explorers, part of the online platform Zooniverse.Ī study describing the system has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. Kepler trails behind Earth, measuring the brightness of stars that may potentially host exoplanets - planets outside of our solar system. The team continues to make preparations to attempt to bring the control systems back online should communications with IMAGE be re-established.Ī system of at least five exoplanets was discovered in 2017 by citizen scientists using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope. The team continues to assess what may be the issue, but it is known that this episode does not mimic the sudden silence that occurred in 2005 - when contact was originally lost with the spacecraft. 22, 2018, the signal from IMAGE began to break up and has been silent since Feb. ![]() It is possible that IMAGE’s spin axis had drifted to an orientation where the antenna’s signal was reaching Earth during part of its rotational period, which would explain the dropout pattern observed. In the following weeks, however, the radio signal began weakening in a sputtering pattern consistent with the spacecraft’s last known spin period. The NASA team was able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system was operational. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite, and sure enough, the signal showed that the spacecraft ID was 166 - the designation for IMAGE. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, acquired time on the Deep Space Network to focus on the source and determine whether the signal was indeed IMAGE. IMAGE launched in 2000, but contact was unexpectedly lost on Dec. Tilley had made contact with a NASA satellite called Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE). In January 2018, amateur astronomer Scott Tilley contacted NASA with a remarkable message: He believed he had found a lost spacecraft. (Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio/Tom Bridgman, lead animator) A South Pole aurora caused by a coronal mass ejection was captured by IMAGE in the fall of 2003.
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