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Optical properties of dust from Jupiter family comets
Levasseur-Regourd, A. C.; Hadamcik, E.
To try to define specific physical properties of the dust of Jupiter-family comets (JFCs), we compare the light scattered by them. Amongst the more than 1000 JFCs, less than 200 are numbered, 40 of them being rather bright. In the present work we use data from the latter. In situ observations of three nuclei show low albedo surfaces. The albedo of…
Probing the internal structure of the nuclei of comets
Lasue, J.; Levasseur-Regourd, A. C.; Hadamcik, E. +1 more
There is no direct evidence about the internal structure of cometary nuclei, which are mostly hidden by their gas and dust comae, and have not yet been orbited by any spacecraft. Their densities are low, typically of about 400 kg m -3 for 9P/Tempel 1 (that was impacted by the Deep Impact probe) and 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (that is the…