Search Publications
Abundant ammonium hydrosulphide embedded in cometary dust grains
Altwegg, K.; Fuselier, S. A.; Rubin, M. +7 more
Ammonium hydrosulphide has long since been postulated to exist at least in certain layers of the giant planets. Its radiation products may be the reason for the red colour seen on Jupiter. Several ammonium salts, the products of NH3, and an acid have previously been detected at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The acid H2S is…
Modelling the water and carbon dioxide production rates of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Samarasinha, Nalin H.; Farnocchia, Davide; Gutiérrez, Pedro J. +1 more
The European Space Agency Rosetta/Philae mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014-2016 is the most complete and diverse investigation of a comet carried out thus far. Yet, many physical and chemical properties of the comet remain uncertain or unknown, and cometary activity is still not a well-understood phenomenon. We here attempt to pla…
The effect of hierarchical structure of the surface dust layer on the modelling of comet gas production
Blum, J.; Hartogh, P.; Bentley, M. S. +3 more
A hierarchical model of microstructure of cometary dust seems to accurately capture the morphological complexity of these particles as observed by the Rosetta mission to the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The main aim of this work is to investigate how uncertainties in the knowledge of the microstructure of the surface layer affect our estimates of ga…
Cometary dust analogues for physics experiments
Zhang, X.; Sierks, H.; Blum, J. +25 more
The CoPhyLab (Cometary Physics Laboratory) project is designed to study the physics of comets through a series of earth-based experiments. For these experiments, a dust analogue was created with physical properties comparable to those of the non-volatile dust found on comets. This 'CoPhyLab dust' is planned to be mixed with water and CO2
Dynamics of irregularly shaped cometary particles subjected to outflowing gas and solar radiative forces and torques
Bertini, Ivano; Fulle, Marco; Moreno, Fernando +6 more
The dynamics of irregularly shaped particles subjected to the combined effect of gas drag and radiative forces and torques in a cometary environment is investigated. The equations of motion are integrated over distances from the nucleus surface up to distances where the gas drag is negligible. The aerodynamic forces and torques are computed assumi…
CO2-driven surface changes in the Hapi region on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Da Deppo, Vania; Lellouch, Emmanuel; Buratti, Bonnie J. +24 more
Between 2014 December 31 and 2015 March 17, the OSIRIS cameras on Rosetta documented the growth of a $140\, \mathrm{\hbox{-}m}$ wide and $0.5\, \mathrm{\hbox{-}m}$ deep depression in the Hapi region on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This shallow pit is one of several that later formed elsewhere on the comet, all in smooth terrain that primarily …
Albedo variegation on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Buratti, Bonnie J.; Hicks, Michael D.; Davidsson, Björn J. R.
We here study the level of albedo variegation on the nucleus of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This is done by fitting the parameters of a standard photometric phase function model to disc-average radiance factor data in images acquired by the Rosetta/OSIRIS Narrow Angle Camera in the orange filter. Local discrepancies between the observed radia…
Combining Rosetta's GIADA and MIDAS data: morphological versus dynamical properties of dust at 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Lasue, J.; Fulle, M.; Della Corte, V. +10 more
We related morphological (size/shape) and dynamical properties of the dust ejected from the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet by combining data from two instruments onboard the ESA's Rosetta mission, i.e. the MIDAS atomic force microscope and the GIADA dust detector. The two instruments detected dust of different size (10-6-10-5
Collisional evolution of the trans-Neptunian region in an early dynamical instability scenario
Vincent, Jean-Baptiste; Campo Bagatin, Adriano; Benavidez, Paula G. +2 more
Any early or late dynamical instability in the outer Solar system should have left their footprint on the trans-Neptunian object (TNO) populations. Here, we study the collisional and dynamical evolution of such populations numerically by an updated version of ALICANDEP, which suitably takes into account the onset of an early dynamical instability.…
Searching for outbursts in the ground-based photometry of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Gardener, Daniel; Snodgrass, Colin; Ligier, Nicolas
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is a Jupiter-family comet that was the target of the Rosetta mission, the first mission to successfully orbit and land a probe on a comet. This mission was accompanied by a large ground-based observing campaign. We have developed a pipeline to calibrate and measure photometry of comet 67P during its 2016 perihelion passag…