Using HST Plume Height Data to Place Lower Bounds on Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Fragment Mass and Penetration Depth

Details Using HST Plume Height Data to Place Lower Bounds on Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Fragment Mass and Penetration Depth Using HST Plume Height Data to Place Lower Bounds on Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Fragment Mass and Penetration Depth

Mar 1996

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996lpi....27..269c&link_type=abstract

Lunar and Planetary Science, volume 27, page 269

Physics

2

Comets, Fireballs, Impacts, Plumes, Shoemaker-Levy 9

Scientific paper

Models of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fragments entering the Jovian atmosphere and subsequent plume evolution are strongly constrained by the seemingly contradictory observations that plumes observed by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) all had approximately the same maximum altitude yet the dark ejecta they left behind varied considerably in albedo and lateral extent. We modeled plume evolution for fragments with diameters of 125-2000 m using the CTH shock-physics code. Initial conditions were provided by an analytical model that has been calibrated against numerical entry simulations. The plume simulations show that maximum altitude of a specific isodensity contour is an increasing function of fragment size and mass. However, if the tops of the plumes observed by HST are derived from material originating from a specific level of the atmosphere (an isocomposition contour), then maximum plume heights are independent of fragment size provided the fragments penetrated at least 30 km below this level. For example, if the tops of the plumes originated from the visible cloud tops, then fragment masses greater than 4x10^12 g (equal to 200 m diameter fully dense water ice) are required to explain the observations. If the visible plumes originated from the NH4SH layer, then masses greater than 3x10^13 g (400 m water ice) are required.

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