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The destruction of the cometary nucleus - The case of 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann

Wesołowski, M.

The paper presents an analysis of the actual brightness change of comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann, which took place in 1995. The consequence of a cometary outburst is the destruction of a fragment of its surface. This causes the emission of comet material from both the surface and from exposed subsurface layers. Therefore, the calculations take int…

The energy transfer process in planetary flybys

Anderson, John D.; Campbell, James K.; Nieto, Michael Martin

We illustrate the energy transfer during planetary flybys as a function of time using a number of flight mission examples. The energy transfer process is rather more complicated than a monotonic increase (or decrease) of energy with time. It exhibits temporary maxima and minima with time which then partially moderate before the asymptotic conditio…

A fully 3-dimensional thermal model of a comet nucleus

Rosenberg, Eric D.; Prialnik, Dina

A 3-D numerical model of comet nuclei is presented. An implicit numerical scheme was developed for the thermal evolution of a spherical nucleus composed of a mixture of ice and dust. The model was tested against analytical solutions, simplified numerical solutions, and 1-D thermal evolution codes. The 3-D code was applied to comet 67P/Churyumov-Ge…

VISPO project: visible image-spectrometer for planetary observations

Piccioni, G.; Capaccioni, F.; De Petris, M. +3 more

Satellite instrumentations designed for planetary studies are often open to other interesting applications from ground: not only one can efficiently carry out detailed calibrations before space data become available, but also the prototypes of the satellite instruments can be successfully employed in different fields ranging from astrophysics to c…