Swift Grism Spectroscopy of Comets: A First Application to C/2007 N3 (Lulin)
Abstract
Cometary nuclei are considered relatively pristine leftovers from the early days of our Solar System, so the composition of their native ices provides fundamental observational tests of cosmogony. The instruments on board Swift provide a unique window for studying comets. The wide spectral and spatial grasp of the UVOT grism permits simultaneous sampling of the molecular daughter fragments responsible for most of the UV and optical emission from coma gases, while UVOT images reveal the distribution and temporal development of gas and dust in the coma and XRT spectra reveals the interaction between coma gases and the solar wind.
Grism spectroscopy combines spatially resolved spectroscopy over large apertures for faint objects. We developed a novel methodology based on a Haser comet model to analyze grism observations of comets. This allowed us to measure production rates of OH, CS, NH, CN, C3 and C2, as well dust production rates. DB is supported through the NASA Postdoctoral Program.- Publication:
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AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division #11
- Pub Date:
- March 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010HEAD...11.4020B