Svetlana Ivanovna Gerasimenko (Russian: Светлана Ивановна Герасименко; Ukrainian: Світлана Іванівна Герасименко; born 1945) is a Soviet and Tajikistani astronomer origin and discoverer of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

[1] 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.