Modeling Comet 103P/Hartley 2 for the Deep Impact Extended Investigation (DIXI)

Statistics – Computation

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

The DIXI mission successfully encountered comet 103P/Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, 2010, and obtained observations using its three scientific instruments. We describe a systematic study of relevant cometary molecules in the coma of comet Hartley 2 relevant to the DIXI encounter. We have employed a suite of computational tools to analyze observations of comet Hartley 2 in order to gain insights into the important physical and chemical processes that occur in its coma and the chemical composition of its nucleus. The computational tools have been developed over the past decades and successfully applied to many comets; including ComChem, a global, gas dynamics simulation with chemistry of the cometary coma and ComFluo, a time-dependent fluorescence model with collisions and superposition of non-equilibrium states appropriate for molecules of interest in comets. To obtain the chemical composition by modeling the observed spectra, it is important to take into account all relevant physical and chemical processes with sufficient level of details that doesn't oversimplify the interpretation of the complex molecular spectra. The versatile model we have developed accomplishes this and can be applied to in situ measurements and observations of other comets and molecules. The model chemistry successfully accounts for composition of many species. For example, the formation of CN is predominately due to photodissociation and electron impact dissociation of HCN, but other molecules (e.g., CH3CN) are minor sources. Cometocentric profiles of other molecules in the inner coma and mapping chemical pathways that couple them are presented.

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