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Narrow Dust Jets in a Diffuse Gas Coma: A Natural Product of Small Active Regions on Comets

Combi, M. R.; Fougere, N.; Gombosi, T. I. +2 more

Comets often display narrow dust jets but more diffuse gas comae when their eccentric orbits bring them into the inner solar system and sunlight sublimates the ice on the nucleus. Comets are also understood to have one or more active areas covering only a fraction of the total surface active with sublimating volatile ices. Calculations of the gas …

WISE/NEOWISE Preliminary Analysis and Highlights of the 67p/Churyumov-Gerasimenko near Nucleus Environs

Masiero, Joseph R.; Wright, Edward L.; Tholen, David J. +15 more

On 2010 January 18-19 and June 28-29, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft imaged the Rosetta mission target, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. We present a preliminary analysis of the images, which provide a characterization of the dust environment at heliocentric distances similar to those planned for the initial spacecraft e…

Multiband Optical Observation of the P/2010 A2 Dust Tail

Hasegawa, Sunao; Usui, Fumihiko; Yoshida, Michitoshi +6 more

An inner main-belt asteroid, P/2010 A2, was discovered on 2010 January 6. Based on its orbital elements, it is considered that the asteroid belongs to the Flora collisional family, where S-type asteroids are common, while showing a comet-like dust tail. Although analysis of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and Rosetta spacecraft suggeste…