Water Production Rates from SOHO/SWAN H Lyman-alpha Observations of Comets

Details Water Production Rates from SOHO/SWAN H Lyman-alpha Observations of Comets Water Production Rates from SOHO/SWAN H Lyman-alpha Observations of Comets

Oct 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.5303c&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #53.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.520

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SWAN, the all-sky hydrogen Lyman-α camera on the SOHO spacecraft, makes routine images of the interplanetary neutral hydrogen around the sun and thus monitors the effect of the variable solar wind on its distribution. SWAN has an ongoing campaign to make observations of comets, both short and long period ones, in addition to making serendipitous observations of comets as part of the all-sky monitoring program. We report here on our progress in observing and analyzing new SWAN observations as well as analyzing the numerous archived comets observed during the 11-year mission of the SOHO spacecraft. Because of SOHO's location at the L1 Lagrange point, SWAN is able to observe comets almost continuously over a large portion of their apparitions and provide excellent temporal coverage of the gas production. In addition to calculating production rates from each image, for comets that are bright enough we use our time-resolved model (TRM) that analyzes an entire sequence of images over many days to several weeks and even months, from which daily average water production rates can be extracted over continuous periods of several days to weeks or months. We report here on results of C/2006 P1 McNaught, C/2002 T7 LINEAR, three apparitions of 2P/Encke, the Deep Space 1 target comet 19P/Borrelly, and the Stardust target comet 81P/ Wild 2. We present the results of a growing sample of comets that are yielding some interesting comparisons of water production rate variations with heliocentric distance.
This work was partially supported by grant NNG05GF06G from the NASA Planetary Astronomy Program and grant NNX06AB60G from the NASA Outer Planets Research Program. SOHO is a mission of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. SWAN was financed in France by CNES with support from CNRS and in Finland by TEKES and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

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