73p/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 - One Orbit after Break-Up: Search for Fragments

Details 73p/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 - One Orbit after Break-Up: Search for Fragments 73p/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 - One Orbit after Break-Up: Search for Fragments

Mar 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002em%26p...90..131b&link_type=abstract

Earth, Moon, and Planets, v. 90, Issue 1, p. 131-139 (2002).

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Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, Fragments, Nucleus Splitting

Scientific paper

We report on our search campaign for the fragments of the Jupiter family comet and target of NASA's CONTOUR mission, Comet 3P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, one orbit revolution after the splitting of its nucleus in 1995 (Boehnhardt et al., 1995). Fragment C was found back with coma in November 1999 at 4 AU inbound and it continued to be active during the perihelion arc until at least December 2001 when we observed it last at 3.3 AU outbound. Fragment B was observed with coma between July and September 2001 when moving outbound from 2.35 to 2.75 AU. The search for other fragments including A, D (Boehnhardt et al., 1995) and E (Kodata et al., 2000a, b; Nakamura et al., 2000) in a search area of 15 × 4 arcmin starting at fragment C along direction of the extended radius vector was not successful in July and September 2001. The limiting magnitude of this search of ~ 25 mag in R puts an upper limit on the radius of potential fragments of about 200 m (assuming albedo 0.04). The orbit deceleration parameter and the observed coma brightness of component C suggest that this object is the primary fragment that may contain a major part of the original nucleus.

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