For the measurements, sure somebody has to do it (it is certainly more complex than the more usual ground-based asteroid or even comet observations), but for orbit determination, if there are enough observations, why should it be difficult, while the MPC is able to deal with a far larger number of minor planets?
Adrien
It is my understanding that a very large number is ready to be announced. I do not know where the bottleneck is, maybe Bill Gray or Karl Battams are able to enlighten us. In the end you need to measure these objects and do the orbit determination, and we speak of hundreds if not of thousands of objects. You need someone to do that and pay for this work. Also, after Brian Marsden's death these objects were no longer given as much focus as before.
Maik
Sent from my mobile
Hi,
Please people correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the MPC initially decided to designate only the comets with a large enough number of observations for the orbit to be constrained well enough. SOHO comets usually have only a few observations in at most a few days and, if I'm not wrong, the resolution is not at the sub-arcsecond level that we are now used to with other observations (I think the resolution is a few tens of arcseconds per pixel, right?), so I think this is why they excluded them.
I think that, in practice, this criterion later turned mostly into the designation of only the comets with ground-based observations. Consequently, a few rare SOHO comets still get designated if they manage to be observed from the ground, but most SOHO comets are seen only by SOHO.
I think it's a bit unfortunate, especially for the SOHO comets known to have been observed at several perihelia (and therefore probably numberable), whose orbit is therefore probably fairly well constrained despite the intrinsic limitations of SOHO. The large number of SOHO comets is certainly also statistically useful even if the individual orbits are not extremely well constrained.
Adrien
Why don't do SOHO comets receive MPC names after 2010? (C/YYYY {letter}{number})
