73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3-B observed from the optical ground station

Details 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3-B observed from the optical ground station 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3-B observed from the optical ground station

Jan 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008a%26a...477..299h&link_type=abstract

Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 477, Issue 1, January I 2008, pp.299-308

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

1

Comets: Individual: 73P-Schwassmann-Wachmann 3-B, Instrumentation: Detectors, Methods: Data Analysis, Techniques: Photometric, Techniques: Spectroscopic

Scientific paper

Aims:In 2006 comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, which split in 1995 into five pieces, approached the Sun again with a swarm of new fragments. The same year in May, the conglomerate of sub-fragments from the original fragment B was observed with the S-Cam3 instrument mounted on the 1-m ESA Optical Ground Station (OGS) telescope in Tenerife, Spain. With a total FOV of ~876 km × 730 km and a spatial resolution of ~73 km/pixel, the S-Cam3 observations provided the possibility to examine dust fragmentation processes, as well as dust and gas outflow, within the first few hundred kilometres of the sub-fragment surfaces. Methods: The superconducting camera, S-Cam3, is an ultra-fast photon counting camera developed by ESA. Cooled to ~0.3 K, its sensitive superconducting tunnel junction sensors detect single photons, measuring their arrival time to accuracies of microseconds and determining its crude wavelength. The camera is also essentially noise-free except for sky background photons. Thus S-Cam3 essentially provides high-speed, low-resolution spectra between 395 nm and 1052 nm with a resolution of ~35 nm at 500 nm wavelength. Results: The images acquired show three intensity maxima that were identified as most likely from the B fragment itself and two clusters of sub-fragments 253 km and 896 km away from fragment B. Furthermore we could see spatial intensity variations on short time scales (2-4 min), indicating the varying dust and gas emission of “subnuclei”. The gas and dust profiles do not show an inverse radial distribution (1/r) in all flow directions, but rather a clear deviation from a free radial outflow. This most likely is due to the gas outflow of one cluster of sub-fragments hitting the outflow of the other cluster. In other words, the material is expanding from one cluster into the other. In addition, the dust particles continue to fragment.

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