Cometary Activity from Minor Planet 2015 VP₅₁ Discovered with Citizen Science

We report the discovery of cometary activity emanating from minor planet 2015 VP 51 outbound from its recent perihelion passage. The activity, in the form of a diffuse tail, was first identified by volunteers of our Citizen Science program Active Asteroids , a NASA Partner program hosted on the Zooniverse platform. This discovery was aided by the recently implemented TailNet artificial intelligence assistant which filters out images with a low likelihood of showing cometary activity. The tail is present in nine images of 2015 VP 51 from the Dark Energy Camera and OmegaCAM between UT 2015 August 2 and UT 2015 October 18. We classify 2015 VP 51 as a Jupiter-family comet based on its Tisserand parameter with respect to Jupiter T J = 2.931.