Ammonia in comet P/Halley

Details Ammonia in comet P/Halley Ammonia in comet P/Halley

Jul 1994

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1994a%26a...287..268m&link_type=abstract

Astronomy and Astrophysics (ISSN 0004-6361), vol. 287, no. 1, p. 268-278

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

27

Abundance, Ammonia, Astronomical Models, Halley'S Comet, Mass Spectra, Water, Error Analysis, Giotto Mission, Mass Spectrometers

Scientific paper

In comet P/Halley the abundances of ammonia relative to water reported in the literature differ by about one order of magnitude from roughly 0.1% up to 2%. Different observational techniques seem to have inherent systematic errors. Using the ion mass channels m/q = 19 amu/e, 18 amu/e and 17 amu/e of the Neutral Mass Spectrometer experiment aboard the spacecraft Giotto, we derive a production rate of ammonia of (1.5-0.7+0.5)% relative to water. Inside the contact surface we can explain our data by a nuclear source only. The uncertainty in our abundance of ammonia is primarily a result of uncertainties in some key reaction coefficients. We discuss in detail these reactions and the range of error indicated results from extreme assumptions in the rate coefficients. From our data, even in the worst case, we can exclude the ammonia abundance to be only of the order of a few per mill.

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