Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite Monitoring of the Water Vaporization Rate of Seven Comets Between 1999 and 2005

Details Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite Monitoring of the Water Vaporization Rate of Seven Comets Between 1999 and 2005 Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite Monitoring of the Water Vaporization Rate of Seven Comets Between 1999 and 2005

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.3304b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #33.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.545

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

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Scientific paper

The Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) is a NASA small explorer mission which carries a radio telescope in a low-Earth orbit. SWAS observes the ground-state 110-101 rotational transition of ortho-water at 556.937 GHz (λ=538.289 μm) and the water isotopologue H218O at 547.676 GHz (λ=547.676 μm) simultaneously with the low-lying transitions of three other astrophysically important species (13CO, CI and O2). The telescope beam size at the frequency of the ortho-water ground-state transition is 3.3 ×4.5 arcminutes and the heterodyne receiver on board SWAS allows for spectroscopic observations with a velocity resolution of 0.8 km/s. SWAS is therefore ideally suited to measure the total amount of the rotationally cold water in the cometary atmosphere, and thus to monitor the activity of comets.
SWAS provided the first detection of the 110-101 ground-state transition in C/1999 H1 (Lee) in May 1999, and monitored the emission of six additional comets between February 2001 and September 2005: C/1999 T1(McNaught-Hartley), C/2001 A2 (LINEAR), C/2000 WM1 (LINEAR), 153P (Ikeya-Zhang), 2P (Encke), and 9P (Tempel 1). The monitoring observations cover periods between 1.5 weeks and 3 months for each comet, depending on its visibility and the observing constraints imposed by
the Earth, Sun, and Moon avoidance angles. The heliocentric distances of the comets typically range between 1 and 2 AU for the observations. We derive the water vaporization rate QH2Ofrom the integrated intensity of the water line. Typical Q(H2O) range between a few times 1027 1/s for 2P (Encke) and 9P (Tempel), and 1029 1/s measured for 153P (Ikeya-Zhang) in April 2001. The variation of QH2O with time and the heliocentric distance is studied.

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