Observations Of The Fragments Of Comet 73p/ Schwassmann-wachmann 3 From Esa's Ogs Telescope

Details Observations Of The Fragments Of Comet 73p/ Schwassmann-wachmann 3 From Esa's Ogs Telescope Observations Of The Fragments Of Comet 73p/ Schwassmann-wachmann 3 From Esa's Ogs Telescope

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.0603h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #06.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.490

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The continuing disintegration of Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3B on its return in 2006 has been observed by the ESA Comet Science Team during two nights in May, 2006. On the 6th we have monitored Fragment B with S-CAM3 attached to the 1-m telescope of ESA's Optical Ground Station (OGS) on Tenerife. On the 17th we obtained BVR images, from the ESA OGS CCD based camera, of the same fragment.
The superconducting camera, S-CAM3, is an ultra fast photon counting camera, developed by ESA. Its sensitive electronic detectors measure the photon arrival time to microseconds and determines its crude color while essentially being noise free except for sky background photons. Thus this photon counting camera provides high speed low resolution spectra between 320 nm and 800 nm.
S-CAM3 acquired for 2 h images showing three intensity maxima indicating most likely the B Fragment and two clusters of sub-fragments at 320 km and 1245 km distance. These three features have been investigated in their sizes and shapes and color differences.
The total FOV of the S-CAM3 data is 1241km x 949 km with a spatial resolution of 73 km/pixel. This provides us the possibility to look for any changes of the gas and dust outflow from the fragments within the first hundreds of kilometers. Indeed we have observed a clear deviation from free radial outflow most likely because of a "downward” dust and gas outflow of one cluster of sub fragments hitting the "upward” emission of the second cluster.
Because of S-CAM3's time resolution we have also studied short time variations in size, shape, color and dust and gas outflow of the fragments. To obtain information of any variation of the coma within a longer time variation we have compared the S-CAM3 data with the BVR data of 73P/SW-3B acquired eleven days later.

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