Composition of Plasma Inside the Coma of Comet 19P/Borrelly

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6025 Interactions With Solar Wind Plasma And Fields, 6026 Ionospheres: Composition And Chemistry, 6050 Plasma And Mhd Instabilities

Scientific paper

On September 22, 2001, the Deep Space 1 spacecraft flew through the coma of Comet 19P/Borrelly, coming within ~1500 km of the central nucleus at a relative velocity of 17 km/s. We report here on initial analysis of ion composition data obtained from the Plasma Experiment for Planetary Exploration (PEPE), a plasma energy-angle-mass/charge spectrometer that simultaneously measures ions and electrons over the energy range ~few eV to 32 keV/q and the M/Q range 1 to ~100 amu/e. From earlier ground-based observations we anticipate a Borrelly gas production rate of ~6 x 1028 molecules/s, about 3% that of Halley (the latter is the only other comet for which there is data comparable to ours obtained during a direct flyby of the nucleus). The parent composition of Borrelly is known to reflect a volatile inventory relatively poor in C2 and C3 (~10% of the Halley ratio of Cn/H2O), but with normal abundances of CN and NH2. In addition to observations of coma composition, we also anticipate measuring the admixture of solar wind ions that charge exchange with the neutral coma. The latter lead to X-rays that should be observable by the Chandra telescope.

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