Asteroids and Comets: Comet Hunters
Clip: Special | 1m 4sVideo has Closed Captions
How many comets have we identified?
It took humans centuries to identify about 900 comets, but it only took a NASA spacecraft a few years to find an additional 2000-plus. Meet SOHO. It’s a really good comet hunter.
Science Trek is a local public television program presented by IdahoPTV
Major Funding by the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation and the Idaho National Laboratory. Additional Funding by the Friends of Idaho Public Television and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Asteroids and Comets: Comet Hunters
Clip: Special | 1m 4sVideo has Closed Captions
It took humans centuries to identify about 900 comets, but it only took a NASA spacecraft a few years to find an additional 2000-plus. Meet SOHO. It’s a really good comet hunter.
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Science Trek
Science Trek is a place where parents, kids, and educators can watch short, educational videos on a variety of science topics. Every Monday Science Trek releases a new video that introduces children to math, science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) career potentials in a fun, informative way.(MUSIC) JOAN CARTAN-HANSEN, HOST: The first astronomers observed comets by watching the night sky.
From the ground, they identified about 900 comets from 1761 to 1995.
But as it turns out, human scientists are no match for the best comet hunter in space.
That's the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, better known as "SOHO."
It was originally designed to study the sun, but scientists soon realized it was really good at finding comets.
So far, it's found more than 3000.
But most of the comets its finds disintegrate.
SOHO finds comets that pass very close to the sun.
And those comets just can't handle the intense sunlight.
So, they're destroyed.
Astronomers think most of these comets are fragments of a much bigger comet that broke apart thousands of years ago.
Scientists can learn a lot from these dying comets.
Their tails are pushed around by the sun's magnetic fields.
So, watching these tails move can tell researchers more about how the sun works.
For more information about asteroids and comets, check out the Science Trek website.
You'll find it at ScienceTrek.org
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Video has Closed Captions
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Science Trek is a local public television program presented by IdahoPTV
Major Funding by the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation and the Idaho National Laboratory. Additional Funding by the Friends of Idaho Public Television and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.