Bibcode
Lara, L. M.; de León, J.; Licandro, J.; Gutiérrez, P. J.
Bibliographical reference
Earth, Moon, and Planets, Volume 97, Issue 1-2, pp. 165-175
Advertised on:
10
2005
Citations
13
Refereed citations
13
Description
Broadband imaging of Comet 67P/Churyumov Gerasimenko has provided more
data on the characterisation of the target of the ESA Rosetta Mission.
The comet monitoring between r h=2.37 and r h=2.78
AU postperihelion shows a prominent dust coma which extends up to ≈
25,000 km from the nucleus, and a long dust structure in approximately
anti-tail direction, reaching at least 230,000 km, identified as a
neck-line structure. The non-isotropic dust emission is detected from
the structures in the inner coma, and it is reflected on the slope of
linear fits of surface brightness profiles vs. cometocentric projected
distance in log log representation as m ≈ 0.83-0.941. Besides
the long dust spike at position angle of 295°, the morphological
study of the dust coma confirms the presence of two structures at
position angles of 95 and 195° where the overabundance of dust can
be as high as 50% at ρ ≤ 30,000 km. The A f ρ parameter
derived from our R broadband data is 26.0 and 29.8 cm at r
h=2.37 and 2.48 AU postperihelion. The dust reflectivity
S'(λ), a measurement of the dust colour, is 0.061±0.019, a
rather neutral colour.