Seasonal changes of the volatile density in the coma and on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Tobias Kramer, Matthias Laeuter, Martin Rubin, Kathrin Altwegg
(Submitted on 12 Apr 2017)

Starting from several monthly data sets of Rosetta’s COmetary Pressure Sensor we reconstruct the gas density in the coma around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The underlying inverse gas model is constructed by fitting ten thousands of measurements to thousands of potential gas sources distributed across the entire nucleus surface. The ensuing self-consistent solution for the entire coma density and surface activity reproduces the temporal and spatial variations seen in the data for monthly periods with Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.93 and higher. For different seasonal illumination conditions before and after perihelion we observe a systematic shift of gas sources on the nucleus.

Comments:    11 pages, 7 figures, accepted in MNRAS (2017)
Subjects:    Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
DOI:    10.1093/mnras/stx866
Cite as:    arXiv:1704.03874 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1704.03874v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Tobias Kramer 
[v1] Wed, 12 Apr 2017 08:01:12 GMT (5412kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03874