The Deep Impact Coma of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 as a Time-of-Flight Experiment Motivates DDSCAT Models for Porous Aggregate Grains with Silicate Crystal Inclusions

Details The Deep Impact Coma of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 as a Time-of-Flight Experiment Motivates DDSCAT Models for Porous Aggregate Grains with Silicate Crystal Inclusions The Deep Impact Coma of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 as a Time-of-Flight Experiment Motivates DDSCAT Models for Porous Aggregate Grains with Silicate Crystal Inclusions

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.2804w&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #28.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.960

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Spitzer IRS spectra of short-period Ecliptic Comets (ECs) have silicate features, and many have distinct crystalline silicate peaks. These Spitzer spectra, when fitted with thermal models after subtraction of the relatively strong contribution of the nuclear flux to the IR spectrum (e.g., Harker et al. 2007), demonstrate ECs have weaker silicate features than long-period Nearly-Isotropic Comets (NICs). There are exceptions, however, as some NICs also have weak features like most ECs. Grains with lower porosities (lower fraction of vacuum) can explain weaker silicate features (Kelley and Wooden 2009; Kolokolova et al. 2007). Alternatively, omitting the smallest (submicron) solid grains can reduce the contrast of the silicate feature (Lisse et al. 2006). However, so far, only models for solid submicron crystals fit the crystalline peaks in spectra of comets with weak silicate features. This presents a dilemma: how can the coma be devoid of small grains except for the crystals? The Spitzer spectra of the Deep Impact event with EC 9P/Tempel 1 provides a data set to model larger porous grains with crystal inclusions because the post-impact coma was a time-of-flight experiment: an impulsive release of grains were size-sorted in time by their respective gas velocities so that the smaller grains departed the inner coma quicker than larger grains. A velocity law derived from fitting small beam Gemini spectra (Harker et al. 2007) indicates that at 20 hour post-impact the (pre-impact subtracted) Spitzer IRS spectrum contained grains larger than 10-20 micron radii, moving at 20 m/s, that produced a weak silicate feature with an 11.2 micron crystalline olivine peak. Furthermore, this feature looks like the silicate feature from the nominal coma. We present some results of a computational effort to model discrete crystals and mixed-mineral porous aggregate grains with silicate crystal inclusions using DDSCAT on the NAS Pleiades supercomputer.

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