[6] The spacecraft came as close as 200 km, but could not take pictures because some instruments were damaged from its encounter with Halley's Comet.

[1] The comet was discovered in 1902 by John Grigg of New Zealand, and rediscovered in its next appearance in 1922 by John Francis Skjellerup, an Australian then living and working for about two decades in South Africa where he was a founder member of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa.

In 1987, it was belatedly discovered by Ľubor Kresák that the comet had been observed in 1808 as well, by Jean-Louis Pons.

Pons observed the comet on 6 and 9 February, which was insufficient to calculate an approximate orbit.

[9] Having its recent perihelion so close to Earth's orbit made it an easy target to reach for the Giotto spacecraft in 1992, whose primary mission was to Comet Halley.