The Soho/swan Survey of Water Production in 61 Comets

The Solar Wind Anisotropies (SWAN) instrument on the SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite has observed 44 long period and new Oort cloud comets and 39 apparitions of 17 short period comets since its launch in December 1995. Water production rates have been have been determined from these over 3000 images producing a consistent set of activity variations over large parts of each comet's orbit enabling the calculation of exponential variations of these comets with heliocentric distance both before and after perihelion as well as the absolute values of the water production rates. These various measures of water activity including pre- and post-perihelion exponents, absolute water production rates, and active surface areas and their variations have been compared with a number of dynamical quantities for each comet including dynamical class, original semimajor axis, nucleus radius, and Tisserand criterion. SOHO is an international cooperative mission between ESA and NASA. Support from grant NNX15AJ81G from the Solar System Observations Planetary Astronomy Program and past support from grant NNX13AQ66G from the Planetary Mission Data Analysis Program are gratefully acknowledged. SOHO is a cooperative international mission of ESA and NASA, and support from the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), CNRS and CNES is also acknowledged.