First in-situ measurements of a highly fragmented comet: ACE SWICS and WIND STICS measurements

Details First in-situ measurements of a highly fragmented comet: ACE SWICS and WIND STICS measurements First in-situ measurements of a highly fragmented comet: ACE SWICS and WIND STICS measurements

Dec 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufm.p11a1574l&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #P11A-1574

Physics

[2152] Interplanetary Physics / Pickup Ions, [2164] Interplanetary Physics / Solar Wind Plasma, [6008] Planetary Sciences: Comets And Small Bodies / Composition, [6023] Planetary Sciences: Comets And Small Bodies / Comets: Dust Tails And Trails

Scientific paper

While many of the characteristics of comets and their local plasma environment are obtained using remote sensing via spectroscopic methods, space-based mass spectrometers allow a unique opportunity to directly sample cometary material in situ. To date there have been only a handful of in-situ spacecraft encounters with comets, such as 1P/Halley, 103P/Hartley, 81P/Wild and others. Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann started to disintegrate in 1995, two major components B and C were recovered in 2001, and it burst into more than 36 pieces during its passage near the Earth in 2006. Serendipitously, some very distant fragmentation members, well-separated from the major identified fragments, passed between the Earth and Sun. Cometary pickup ions and possibly recombined solar wind minor ions convected past the Earth in late May 2006 and were observed by both the ACE/SWICS and WIND/STICS mass spectrometers, which are located in halo orbits around the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point. Most of these observations took place a few days after the main comet fragments passed through the ecliptic, when their orbits crossed the spacecraft-Sun line, suggesting additional pieces lagging far behind the main fragments. In this paper, we present the first in-situ observation of these pieces that passed very close to the spacecraft (<0.07AU) and conduct a comparative analysis of composition and characteristics of pick-up ions originating from a number of the cometary fragments. We find that the pick-up ion trail related to the comet fragments is much longer than expected. We constrain the C+/O+ and He+/He++ ratio and discuss the implications for the production rates of different fragments.

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