Regensburg 2007 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik
EP 5: Mars II, Venus, Merkur, Pluto
EP 5.5: Vortrag
Montag, 26. März 2007, 17:00–17:15, H46
The Large Particle Component of the Dust from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — •Jessica Agarwal1, Michael Mueller2, Hermann Boehnhardt3, William Reach4, Mark Sykes5, David Lien5, and Eberhard Gruen1 — 1MPI für Kernphysik, Heidelberg — 2ESA/ESOC, Darmstadt — 3MPI für Sonnensystemforschung, Katlenburg-Lindau — 4IPAC/SSC/Caltech, Pasadena, USA — 5Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, USA
We constrain the size distribution of particles larger than about 100 µm emitted by Rosetta target comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Such particles carry the better part of the refractory mass released from the comet to interplanetary space, and they may constitute a hazard to the Rosetta spacecraft, scheduled to reach the comet in 2014. We analyse images of the dust trail and antitail of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko obtained with the Wide Field Imager at the ESO/MPG 2.2m-telescope on La Silla and with the MIPS instrument on board the Spitzer Space Telescope of NASA. We simulate images using a generalised Finson-Probstein model and adjust the slope of the size distribution such that the simulation reproduces the observed images. We find that both the size distribution of large particles and the dependence of the dust production rate on heliocentric distance are those of a fairly typical comet.