Composition of 9P/Tempel 1's Natural Outbursts

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

Natural outbursts are a known cometary phenomenon and have been observed on many cometary nuclei. On its approach to 9P/Tempel 1 in 2005, the Deep Impact (DI) spacecraft unexpectedly detected numerous outbursts from Tempel 1, demonstrating that frequent natural outbursts are common, correlated with rotational phase, and are primarily driven by an endogenic process. Although many outbursts were detected in the DI photometry data, only two of the strong outbursts were also seen by the High Resolution Instrument Infrared Spectrometer (HRI-IR) due to pointing and sampling rate limitations.
We present spectral analysis of the inner coma of Tempel 1 from 1-5 microns during the two strong outbursts detected with the spectrometer. This spectral regime includes emission bands of many volatiles such as the 2.66 micron H2O and 4.26 micron CO2 bands. Preliminary analysis of the spectra show compositional differences between the ambient and outburst coma as well as differences between the two outbursts, pointing to possible heterogeneity in the source regions of the outbursts which occur at different rotational phases of the comet.
This work is funded by NASA grant NNX08AM87G through a contract with the University of Maryland.

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