Search Publications

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…