The Soho-5000 comet identified Monday appears in the smaller white box in the upper left hand corner of the NASA image captured by the SOHO spacecraft. Photo courtesy of ESA/NASA/LASCO G2/UPI
March 27 (UPI) -- A citizen scientist in the Czech Republic on Monday identified a new comet while examining an image captured by the exploratory SOHO spacecraft, which raises to 5,000 the number of comets it has helped discover, NASA reported.
The unnamed comet is part of the Marsden group of comets that obit the sun about every 5.3 years, according to NASA. The comet group is named after Brian Marsden, who was the first scientist to discover the comet group using the European Space Agency's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, commonly referred to as SOHO.
NASA said the Marsden group of comets likely is a subset of the larger 96P/Macholz comet.
SOHO is an international exploratory spacecraft tasked with examining the sun. It also has identified 5,000 comets over the past 28 years, which NASA says makes it the world's most prolific comet hunter.
The European Space Agency and NASA jointly launched SOHO in December 1995 on its mission to study the sun and its outer corona.
SOHO uses a scientific tool that blocks the Sun's immense light to enable scientists to study the sun's corona and its environment.
The spacecraft's special instruments enable SOHO to fly relatively close to the Sun, which makes it one of the few spacecraft capable of viewing comets that also fly very close to the sun. Without the special viewing instrument, the sun's bright glare would hide them from view.
Several comets only are visible when the sunlight makes them bright enough to see when using the types of instruments included on the SOHO spacecraft, according to NASA.
The comet identified Monday is the 75th belonging to the Marsden group that the SOHO spacecraft has identified.
The 5,000 comets identified using the SOHO spacecraft represents more than half of all known comets.
When the SOHO mission first launched 28 years ago, it began identifying comets at a rapid pace, which caused NASA to fund its Sungrazer Project, which enables anyone to identify and report comets revealed by SOHO images.
NASA refers to comets that fly very close to the sun as "sungrazers."
Hanjie Tan is the citizen scientist who identified the 5,000th comet and participates in the Sungrazer Project, NASA said.
Tan is from Guangzhou, China, but is working on a doctoral in astronomy in Prague. Tan has participated in the Sungrazer Project since he was 13 and is the project's youngest person to discover a comet.
Since joining the project in 2009, Tan has identified more than 200 comets.
"I love looking for comets," Tan told NASA, "It's really exciting to be the first to see comets get bright near the Sun after they've been traveling through space for thousands of years."
Before the Sungrazer Project got underway, NASA says only a couple dozen comets were known to fly near the sun. The project identified its 2,000th comet in 2010, which then was the record for most comets identified by a single instrument.
