Comet 17P/Holmes underwent a massive outburst in 2007 Oct., brightening by a factor of almost a million in under 48 hours. We used infrared images taken by the Wide-Field Survey Explorer mission to characterize the comet as it appeared at a heliocentric distance of 5.1 AU almost 3 years after the outburst. The comet appeared to be active with a coma and dust trail along the orbital plane. We constrained the diameter, albedo, and beaming parameter of the nucleus to 4.135 ± 0.610 km, 0.03 ± 0.01 and 1.03 ± 0.21, respectively. The properties of the nucleus are consistent with those of other Jupiter Family comets. The best-fit temperature of the coma was 134 ± 11 K, slightly higher than the blackbody temperature at that heliocentric distance. Using Finson-Probstein modeling we found that the morphology of the trail was consistent with ejection during the 2007 outburst and was made up of dust grains between 250 μm and a few cm in radius. The trail mass was ∼ 1.2 - 5.3 × 1010 kg.
@article{arxiv.1404.5664,
title = {Lingering grains of truth around comet 17P/Holmes},
author = {R. Stevenson and J. M. Bauer and E. A. Kramer and T. Grav and A. K. Mainzer and J. R. Masiero},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.5664},
year = {2015}
}