Dynamics and potential origins of decimeter-sized particles around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
- 1Max Plack Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen, Germany
- 2Institute for Astrophysics, University of Göttingen, Germany
- 3Institute for Geophysics and Extraterrestrial Physics, TU Braunschweig, Germany
- 4CNRS, Laboratoire J.-L. Lagrange, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Nice, France
- 5Aurora Technology B.V. for ESA, ESAC, Madrid, Spain
The activity of comets is still not fully understood. During the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System (OSIRIS) aboard the spacecraft captured numerous image sequences of the comet's near-nucleus coma to record the dynamics of ejected dust particles. Studying their dynamics can help to understand their ejection processes.
At the typical recording distances of 50 km or more, even the largest dust particles (~ 1 cm) cannot be spatially resolved and instead appear as (thousands of) point sources that move through the image sequences. In Pfeifer et al. (2022), we therefore developed an algorithm to track these particles automatically.
Here, we now present the dynamics, size-frequency distributions, potential origins, and implications regarding the ejection process of hundreds of decimeter-sized particles that we tracked through OSIRIS image sequences and traced back to the nucleus surface (see also Pfeifer et al. 2024).
- Pfeifer et al. (2022): https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202141953
- Pfeifer et al. (2024): https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202346380
How to cite: Pfeifer, M., Agarwal, J., Marschall, R., Grieger, B., and Lemos, P.: Dynamics and potential origins of decimeter-sized particles around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Europlanet Science Congress 2024, Berlin, Germany, 8–13 Sep 2024, EPSC2024-417, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc2024-417, 2024.
