Streaming Clumps Ejection Model and the Heterogeneous Inner Coma of Comet Wild

research publications and other research outputs Streaming clumps ejection model and the heterogeneous inner coma of

Dust environment of Comet Hyakutake 1996B2

Narrow-band wide-field CCD images of the dust tail of Comet Hyakutake 1996B2 are analysed by means of the inverse dust tail model (Fulle 1989). The dust tail fits allow us to estimate the ejection velocity, mass loss rate and size distribution of the dust grains ejected during the months of March and April, 1996 (when the heliocentric distance was decreasing from 1.5 AU to 0.5 AU), in the size ...

Investigating Dusty Plasma of Cometary Coma with Nasa Stardust Data

Introduction: Harbingers of doom or prophesy for the ancient peoples of Earth, comets are now understood to be primordial fragments from our Solar System's birth composed of various ices and dust species. Among the questions surrounding comets and their elusive character are the properties and processes of the rarefied gasses and disperse dust that surround their solid nucleus. Dusty, or comple...

Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities at the magnetic cavity boundary of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

[1] We investigate the plasma environment of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the target of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission. Rosetta will rendezvous with the comet in 2014 at almost 3.5 AU and follow it all the way to and past perihelion at 1.3 AU. During its journey towards the inner solar system the comet’s environment will significantly change. The interaction of the solar wind w...

Formation of jets in Comet 19P/Borrelly by subsurface geysers

Observations of the inner coma of Comet 19P/Borrelly with the camera on the Deep Space 1 spacecraft revealed several highly collimated dust jets emanating from the nucleus. The observed jets can be produced by acceleration of evolved gas from a subsurface cavity through a narrow orifice to the surface. As long as the cavity is larger than the orifice, the pressure in the cavity will be greater ...