Detection of outbursts and modeling of the activity during the summer of 2015 with Rosetta
Abstract
The ESA (European Space Agency) Rosetta spacecraft was launched on March 2, 2004 and reached comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P) in August 2014.Close to perihelion in August 2015, a display of outbursts on 67P, known as the summer fireworks (Vincent et al. 2016), was observed with the Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System (OSIRIS) and the NAVCAM. Vincent et al. (2016) reported the detection of 34 outbursts with one on average every 2.4 nucleus rotations.In the case of the Microwave Instrument for the Rosetta Orbiter (MIRO), the most useful scan pattern for tracking gas abundance before, during, and after an outburst was a series of raster scans across the nucleus along the comet-Sun direction. We identified a spectral feature that is indicative of high velocity gas moving toward the spacecraft as being associated with outbursts. In this particular study, we will report the detection of 6 outbursts with MIRO during the summer of 2015. One of the outbursts detected by MIRO was not observed with OSIRIS or the NAVCAM. We will present results for the gas production rate, as obtained from the H216O emission line observed with MIRO and a numerical model of the radiative transfer in the coma.Our goal is to better understand the physics of outbursts and how the dust is lifted by the gas, by comparing model results to OSIRIS images (sensitive to the dust abundance) and MIRO spectra (sensitive to the gas abundance and velocity). We used a Collisionless Gas Simulation tool developed at JPL to study the gas flow close to the nucleus and the dust trajectories as determined by the three main forces acting on the grains: the drag force, gravity and the radiative pressure. Our main objective is to understand the mechanisms responsible for the outburst and the activity. Past studies have shown that outbursts are in fact a combination of both gas and dust, in which the active surface at the source of the outburst is believed to be approximately 10 times more active than the average rate found in the surrounding areas (Gicquel et al. 2017). Preliminary results show that the activity follows the insolation/illumination pattern.
- Publication:
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AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts #49
- Pub Date:
- October 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017DPS....4950902G