Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko's Plasma Environment during Rosetta's Early Comet Phase

Details Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko's Plasma Environment during Rosetta's Early Comet Phase Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko's Plasma Environment during Rosetta's Early Comet Phase

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.2806r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #28.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.960

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The Rosetta spacecraft is on its way to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko to accompany it from roughly 3 AU all the way to perihelion at a heliocentric distance of 1.3 AU. During this journey the comet's gas production rate varies over several orders of magnitude and also the composition of the released material will likely change. Whereas the production of H2O has been derived from observations the relative abundance of CO as well as CO2 is still subject of discussion, especially during Rosetta's early comet phase around 3 AU.
The neutral gas is ionized by mostly solar photons and electron-impact and then picked-up by the solar wind. This mass loading slows down the solar wind as momentum is transferred to the cometary ions and the bow shock appears where the solar wind transitions from supersonic to subsonic speeds. In case of a high enough production rate also a magnetic cavity can form close to nucleus. Here the coupled cometary neutrals and ions flowing out from the nucleus prevent the penetration of solar wind particles that carry the sun's magnetic field.
With respect to the wide range of neutral gas production rates anticipated in the early comet phase we will show results of our magentohydrodynamics (SWMF/BATSRUS) code modeling the plasma environment of the comet. For 2.7 and 3.0 AU we identified 8 different sets of relative and absolute gas production rates injected spherically symmetric as well as in form of jets. We will show our model results thereof and discuss the expected plasma environment for Rosetta during the period of rendezvous and lander deployment.
[This work has been supported by JPL subcontract 1266313 under NASA grant NMO710889 and NSF Planetary Astronomy grant AST0707283. We also acknowledge the support from the ISSI comet-modeling group.]

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