P31E-2105
Modeling of the Inner Coma of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Constrained by VIRTIS and ROSINA Observations

Wednesday, 16 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Nicolas Fougere1, Michael R Combi1, Valeriy Tenishev2, Andre Michel Bieler1, Alessandra Migliorini3, Dominique Bockelée-Morvan4, Gabor Toth1, Zhenguang Huang1, Tamas I Gombosi5, Kenneth C Hansen1, Fabrizio Capaccioni6, Gianrico Filacchione3, Giuseppe Piccioni3, Vincent Debout7, Stéphane Erard4, Cedric Leyrat8, Uwe Fink9, Martin Rubin10, Kathrin Altwegg10, Chia-yu Tzou10, Lena Le Roy11, Ursina Calmonte12, Jean-Jacques Berthelier13, Henri Rème14, Myrtha Hässig15, Stephen A Fuselier16, Bjorn Fiethe17, Johan De Keyser18 and the VIRTIS Science team and the ROSINA Science team, (1)University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI, United States, (2)University of Michigan Ann Arbor, AOSS, Ann Arbor, MI, United States, (3)IAPS-INAF, Rome, Italy, (4)Paris Observatory, Paris, France, (5)Univ of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States, (6)Organization Not Listed, Washington, DC, United States, (7)LESIA Observatoire de Paris, Meudon, France, (8)Paris Observatory Meudon, Meudon, France, (9)LPL, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States, (10)University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, (11)University of Bern, Center for Space and Habitability, Bern, Switzerland, (12)Physikalisches Institut, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, (13)CNRS, Paris Cedex 16, France, (14)IRAP, Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, Toulouse, France, (15)Southwest Research Institute San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, United States, (16)Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX, United States, (17)Technical University of Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany, (18)Belgisch Instituut voor Ruimte-Aeronomie, Brussel, Belgium
Abstract:
As it orbits around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (CG), the Rosetta spacecraft acquires more information about its main target. The numerous observations made at various geometries and at different times enable a good spatial and temporal coverage of the evolution of CG’s cometary coma. However, the question regarding the link between the coma measurements and the nucleus activity remains relatively open notably due to gas expansion and strong kinetic effects in the comet’s rarefied atmosphere.

In this work, we use coma observations made by the ROSINA-DFMS instrument to constrain the activity at the surface of the nucleus. The distribution of the H2O and CO2 outgassing is described with the use of spherical harmonics. The coordinates in the orthogonal system represented by the spherical harmonics are computed using a least squared method, minimizing the sum of the square residuals between an analytical coma model and the DFMS data.

Then, the previously deduced activity distributions are used in a Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) model to compute a full description of the H2O and CO2 coma of comet CG from the nucleus’ surface up to several hundreds of kilometers. The DSMC outputs are used to create synthetic images, which can be directly compared with VIRTIS measurements.

The good agreement between the VIRTIS observations and the DSMC model, itself constrained with ROSINA data, provides a compelling juxtaposition of the measurements from these two instruments.

Acknowledgements

Work at UofM was supported by contracts JPL#1266313, JPL#1266314 and NASA grant NNX09AB59G. Work at UoB was funded by the State of Bern, the Swiss National Science Foundation and by the ESA PRODEX Program. Work at Southwest Research institute was supported by subcontract #1496541 from the JPL. Work at BIRA-IASB was supported by the Belgian Science Policy Office via PRODEX/ROSINA PEA 90020. The authors would like to thank ASI, CNES, DLR, NASA for supporting this research. VIRTIS was built by a consortium formed by Italy, France and Germany, under the scientific responsibility of the IAPS of INAF, which guides also the scientific operations. The consortium includes also the LESIA of the Observatoire de Paris, and the Institut für Planetenforschung of DLR. The authors wish to thank the RSGS and the RMOC for their continuous support.

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