Long term evolution of cometary nuclei - Application to 46P/Wirtanen

Details Long term evolution of cometary nuclei - Application to 46P/Wirtanen Long term evolution of cometary nuclei - Application to 46P/Wirtanen

Dec 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003dps....35.3828g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #35, #38.28; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 35, p.1488

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Scientific paper

We present a new method to study the long term evolution of cometary nuclei in order to retrieve their original size. We consider first the case of comet 46P/Wirtanen (the former target of the Rosetta mission) and we calculate the past evolution of its orbital elements over 105 years, with and without non-gravitational forces. The chaotic behaviour is simulated by considering 9 different values of the initial mean anomaly. For an homogeneous nucleus with a composition of 50% water ice + 50% dust and a density of 500 kg/m3, we obtain an initial radius in the range 1.4-7.8 km, depending upon the inital conditions. This result also depends upon the composition and the density, but not on the presence, or not, of the non-gravitational forces. We will apply this method to many other cometary nuclei in the future.

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