| Native Name: | |
| Birth Name: | Svetlana Ivanovna Gerasimenko |
| Birth Date: | 1945 2, df=y |
| Birth Place: | Baryshivka, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union |
| Citizenship: | Soviet Union → Tajikistan |
| Fields: | Astronomy |
| Alma Mater: | Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv |
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| Thesis1 Url: | and |
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| Thesis1 Year: | and |
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| Known For: | Comet discovery |
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Svetlana Ivanovna Gerasimenko (ru|Светлана Ивановна Герасименко; uk|Світлана Іванівна Герасименко; born 1945) is a Soviet and Tajikistani astronomer origin and discoverer of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
Gerasimenko was born in the Ukrainian SSR in 1945. She is an ethnic Ukrainian; her father was Ukrainian and her mother Polish.[1]
See main article: Rosetta (spacecraft) and Philae (spacecraft).
On 11 September 1969 Gerasimenko while working at the Alma-Ata Astrophysical Institute, near Almaty, the then-capital city of Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union photographed the comet 32P/Comas Solà using a 50-cm Maksutov telescope.[2]
After she returned to her home institute, Klim Ivanovych Churyumov of the Kyiv National University's Astronomical Observatory examined this photograph and found a cometary object near the edge of the plate, but assumed that this was Comas Solà.[3] [4] On 22 October, about a month after the photograph was taken, he discovered that the object could not be Comas Solà, because it was 2-3 degrees off the expected position. Further scrutiny produced a faint image of Comas Solà at its expected position on the plate, thus proving that the other object was a different comet. By looking through all the material collected they found this new object on four more plates, dated 9 and 21 September.[4]
Named after her