English

Models of Rosetta/OSIRIS 67P dust coma phase function

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2018-11-07 v1

Abstract

The phase function of the dust coma of comet 67P has been determined from Rosetta/OSIRIS images \citep{Bertini17}. This function show a deep minimum at phase angles near 100^\circ, and a strong backscattering enhancement. These two properties cannot be reproduced by regular models of cometary dust, most of them based on wavelength-sized and randomly-oriented aggregate particles. We show, however, that an ensamble of oriented elongated particles of a wide variety of aspect ratios, with radii rr \gtrsim10 μ\mum, and whose long axes are perpendicular to the direction of the solar radiation, are capable of reproducing the observed phase function. These particles must be absorbing, with an imaginary part of the refractive index of about 0.1 to match the expected geometric albedo, and with porosity in the 60-70\% range.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.10424,
  title  = {Models of Rosetta/OSIRIS 67P dust coma phase function},
  author = {Fernando Moreno and Daniel Guirado and Olga Muñoz and Ivano Bertini and Cecilia Tubiana and Carsten Guttler and Marco Fulle and Alessandra Rotundi and Vincenzo Della Corte and Stavro Ivanovski and Giovanna Rinaldi and Dominique Bockelee-Morvan and Vladimir Zakharov and Jessica Agarwal and Stefano Mottola and Imre Toth and Elisa Frattin and Luisa Lara and Pedro Gutierrez and Zhong Yi Lin and Ludmilla Kolokolova and Holger Sierks and Giampiero Naletto and Philippe Lamy and Rafael Rodrigo and Detlef Koschny and Bjorn Davidsson and Maria Antonietta Barucci and Jean-Lup Bertaux and Dennis Bodewits and Gabriele Cremonese and Vania Da Deppo and Stefano Debei and Mariolino de Cecco and Jakob Deller and Sonia Fornasier and Wing Ip and Uwe Keller and Monica Lazzarin and Jose Juan Lopez-Moreno and Francesco Marzari and Xian Shi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.10424},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Accepted by Astronomical Journal, September 26th, 2018. 21 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:20:12.053Z