Published in

Oxford University Press (OUP), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2018

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/sty2843

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

The backscattering ratio of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko dust coma as seen by OSIRIS onboard Rosetta

This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

Full text: Unavailable

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Remote sensing observations of dust particles ejected from comets provide important hints on the intimate nature of the materials composing these primitive objects. The measurement of dust coma backscattering ratio, BSR, defined as the ratio of the reflectance at phase angle 0° and 30°, helps tuning theoretical models aimed at solving the inverse scattering problem deriving information on the nature of the ejected particles. The Rosetta/OSIRIS camera sampled the coma phase function of comet 67P, with four series acquired at low phase angles from 2015 January to 2016 May. We also added previously published data to our analysis to increase the temporal resolution of our findings. We measured a BSR in the range ∼ [1.7–3.6], broader than the range found in literature from ground-based observations of other comets. We found that during the post-perihelion phase, the BSR is systematically larger than the classical cometary dust values only for nucleocentric distances smaller than ∼100 km. We explain this trend in terms of a cloud of chunks orbiting the nucleus at distances