The Latest (Dusty) Pieces in the Rosetta Story

The ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft had the unique opportunity to follow comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (hereafter 67P) for about 2.5 years – from January 2014 to September 2016 – observing how the comet evolved while approaching the Sun, passing through perihelion and then moving back into the outer solar system. Remote sensing and in-situ instruments onboard Rosetta acquired data to study the comet’s dust environment during the entire duration of the mission, while telescopes followed the large-scale coma and tails from Earth. Here we report the latest advances of the ongoing multi-instrument approach that the Rosetta dust working group has been following in the recent years. Individual instrument data analyses have been carried on providing a first characterization of 67P dust environment. Timely, multi-instruments data analyses are now progressing a step forward in understanding how comet works and are providing critical results for a more comprehensive and unified knowledge of cometary dust environments. We will illustrate the progress we have made and the results we have reached following this constructive and collaborative approach.

We also discuss the latest achievements on the cometary dust modelling using the multi-instrument Rosetta data. In particular, what additional information these calibrated dust models provide and what we are still missing in cometary dust characterization.