Related papers: Local manifestations of cometary activity
Comets and asteroids have long captured human curiosity, and until recently, all documented examples belonged to our Solar System. That changed with the discovery of the first known interstellar object, 1I/2017 U1 ('Oumuamua), in 2017. Two…
Small bodies in the solar system are conventionally classified into asteroids and comets. However, it is recently found that a small number of objects can exhibit properties of both asteroids and comets. Some are more consistent with…
The Southern hemisphere of the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet has become visible from Rosetta only since March 2015. It was illuminated during the perihelion passage and therefore it contains the regions that experienced the strongest…
A thin, bright dust cloud, which is associated with the Rosetta mission target object (67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko), was observed after the 2002 perihelion passage. The neckline structure or dust trail nature of this cloud is controversial.…
We report on the results of nearly 10 hours of integration of the dust trail and neckline of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P henceforth) using the Wide Field Imager at the ESO/MPG 2.2m telescope in La Silla. The data was obtained in…
The Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis (ROSINA) suite of instruments operated throughout the over two years of the Rosetta mission operations in the vicinity of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It measured gas…
Cometary outgassing can produce torques that change the spin state of the nucleus, influencing the evolution and lifetimes of comets (1,2). If these torques spin up the rotation to the point that centripetal forces exceed the material…
The nature of the icy material accreted by comets during their formation in the outer regions of the protosolar nebula is a major open question in planetary science. Some scenarios of comet formation predict that these bodies agglomerated…
The International Rosetta Mission was launched in 2004 and consists of the orbiter spacecraft Rosetta and the lander Philae. The aim of the mission is to map the comet 67P Churyumov Gerasimenko by remote sensing, to examine its environment…
Some asteroids eject dust, unexpectedly producing transient, comet-like comae and tails. First ascribed to the sublimation of near-surface water ice, mass losing asteroids (also called "main-belt comets") can in fact be driven by a…
Interstellar comets offer direct samples of volatiles from distant protoplanetary disks. 2I/Borisov is the first notably active interstellar comet discovered in our solar system[1]. Comets are condensed samples of the gas, ice, and dust…
Aims. The Alice far-ultraviolet spectrograph onboard Rosetta is designed to observe emissions from various atomic and molecular species from within the coma of comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko and to determine their spatial distribution and…
The Rosetta spacecraft escorted comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for two years, gathering a rich and variable dataset. Amongst the data from the Rosetta Plasma Consortium (RPC) suite of instruments are measurements of the total electron…
The aim of this study is to estimate the rotational characteristics of meteoroids after their release from a comet during normal activity. The results can serve as initial conditions for further analyses of subsequent evolution of rotation…
A body dissipates energy when it freely rotates about any axis different from principal. This entails relaxation, i.e., decrease of the rotational energy, with the angular momentum preserved. The spin about the major-inertia axis…
In this review presented at the Royal Society meeting, "Cometary Science After Rosetta", I present an overview of studies of small solar system objects that exhibit properties of both asteroids and comets (with a focus on so-called active…
Solar wind charge-changing reactions are of paramount importance to the physico-chemistry of the atmosphere of a comet because they mass-load the solar wind through an effective conversion of fast, light solar wind ions into slow, heavy…
We report on magnetic field measurements made in the innermost coma of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in its low activity state. Quasi-coherent, large-amplitude ($\delta B/B \sim 1$), compressional magnetic field oscillations at $\sim$ 40 mHz…
Comets can be divided into two groups: type I, characterized by high gas/dust ratio, low polarization, and a weak or absent 10 micron silicate feature, and type II, for which a low gas/dust ratio, high polarization, and strong silicate…
Recent observations made by the Rosetta/ROSINA instrument have detected molecular oxygen in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko with abundances at the 1-10% level relative to H2O. Previous studies have indicated that the likely…