Comet C/2013 US10 (CATALINA) - Dust in the Infrared with SOFIA

One of the major goals of modern astronomy is the "search for origins'' from the big bang to the development of intelligence. A key process in developing our understanding of these origins is how planetary systems are created from dusty disks around stars and evolve into planets with water and other molecules. Traces of primordial materials, and their least-processed products, are found in the outermost regions of the solar system -- the realm of comets -- in the form of ices of volatile materials (H₂O, NH₃, CO, CH₄, and other more rare species), and more refractory dust grains. There is considerable evidence that in the cold regions where cometary material formed, existing comet bodies were mixed with refractory material processed at much higher temperatures. Remote sensing observation of comets provides a means to study the properties of this dust material to characterize the nature of refactory comet grains. These include observations of both the re-radiated thermal (spectrophotometric) and scattered light (spectrophotometric and polarimetric). The former technique provides our most direct link to the composition (mineral content) of the grains.Here we report our post-perihelion (TP = 2015 Nov 15.721 UT) infrared 2 to 31 micron spectrophotometric observations and dust thermal model analyses of comet C/2013 US10 (Catalina), a dynamically new Oort Cloud comet -- 1/a_org [reciprocal original semimajor axis ] = 0.00005339 -- conducted at two contemporaneous observational epochs near close Earth approach (Δ ≈ 0.93 AU) with NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) complemented by observations from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF).