Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007agufm.p41a0199r&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract #P41A-0199
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
6008 Composition (1060), 6025 Interactions With Solar Wind Plasma And Fields
Scientific paper
The cometary plasma environment is largely influenced by a complex, closely linked series of chemical reactions. To better our understanding of this environment, we compare the results from our ion-chemical network calculation, consisting of a magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) as well as a chemistry model, with data from the Ion Mass Spectrometer collected during Giotto's fly-by at Comet 1P/Halley in 1986. The chemistry code, originally developed by Häberli et al. (1995, Astron. Ap. 297, 881), integrates the 24 most dominant species along streamlines which have been extracted from an MHD model of Comet 1P/Halley [Gombosi et al. (1996, JGR 101, 15233)]. The chemistry code includes a few hundred reactions for these species including photodissociation, photoionization, electron impact ionization, ion-molecule reactions, charge exchange, and dissociative ion- electron recombination. In this work we compare the measured and modeled densities of the C+, CH+, CH2+, CH3+, N+, NH+, NH2+, NH3+, NH4+, O+, OH+, H2O+, H3O+, CO+, HCO+, H3CO+, and CH3OH2+ ions along the Giotto trajectory from 200~000~km to roughly 1000~km at closest approach. Our results are in good agreement, although, in order to reproduce the data in the vicinity of the comet, an additional source for C+, CH+, as well as the CH2+ ions is needed. First investigations indicate that all three species are emerging from the same source which needs to have a short scale length of less than 500~km in order to accommodate with the measurements. Finally, we also show our results of the contact surface which is well resolved and in good agreement with the Giotto data.
Altwegg Kathrin
Balsiger Hans
Combi Michael R.
Gombosi Tamas I.
Hansen Kenneth Calvin
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