A Study of the Velocities of the Ejected Dust and of the Rotational Variability of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 around the Deep Impact Event

Details A Study of the Velocities of the Ejected Dust and of the Rotational Variability of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 around the Deep Impact Event A Study of the Velocities of the Ejected Dust and of the Rotational Variability of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 around the Deep Impact Event

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.1706r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #17.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.513

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

On 4 July 2004, the mission Deep Impact (DI) fired a copper projectile into the nucleus of 9P/ Tempel 1 (Tempel). A crater was formed and material was ejected from the comet. OSIRIS (Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System), the scientific imaging system onboard the ESA Rosetta spacecraft, was activated 5 days before the DI event, and observed Tempel near-continuously for more than two weeks. Surveillance of the comet allowed to derive light curves of the cometary dust ejected by the impact using several apertures of different radii. Additionally, the comet showed regular variations in intensity before and after the impact. We use the large temporal coverage of the photometry database to study the spin state of Tempel. Here we report a discrete linear inverse problem approach for retrieving the velocity distribution of the dust on the 50 hours following the impact collision, and a study of the rotational variability in the OSIRIS observations of Tempel by harmonic analysis.
Several hours after the impact collision, the expanding dust cloud started to leave the apertures. Therefore the flux in each aperture decreases. The observed brightness distribution database of the cometary dust after the impact, a set of simple models of the expansion of the dust ejecta plume for different velocities, and the approach to solve a linear regression problem, allowed us to get insights into the velocity distribution of the expanding cloud. Terminal Velocities are derived using a maximum likelihood estimator. The period of the brightness changes is consistent with the rotation period of Tempel. Our results attempt to provide a more thorough understanding of the properties of the DI dust cloud and of the comet's interior.
We acknowledge the funding of the agencies ASI, CNES, DLR, the Spanish Space Program (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia), SNSB, and ESA.

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