Search

Between Aug. 2014 and Sept. 2016, while ESA's cornerstone mission Rosetta was operating in the vicinity of the nucleus and in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the COSIMA instrument collected a large number of dust particles with diameters up to a millimeter. Positive or negative ions were detected by a time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometer (TOF-SIMS) and the composition of selected particles was deduced. Many of the negative ion mass spectra show, besides mass peaks at the correct position, an additional, extended contribution at the lower mass side caused by partial charging of the dust. This effect, usually avoided in SIMS applications, can in our case be used to obtain information on the electrical properties of the collected cometary dust particles, such as the specific resistivity (ρr>1.2⋅1010Ωm) and the real part of the relative electrical permittivity (εr<1.2). From these values a lower limit for the porosity is derived (P>0.8)., Funding details: Austrian Science Fund, FWF, P26871-N20; Funding details: Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, CNES; Funding details: Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR, 50 QP 1801; Funding text 1: COSIMA was built by a consortium led by the Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik, Garching, Germany in collaboration with Laboratoire de Physique et Chimie de l’Environnement et de l’Espace, Orléans, France, Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, CNRS/Université Paris Sud, Orsay, France, Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, Finland, Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany, von Hoerner und Sulger GmbH, Schwetzingen, Germany, Universität der Bundeswehr München, Neubiberg, Germany, Institut für Physik, Forschungszentrum Seibersdorf, Seibersdorf, Austria, Institut für Weltraumforschung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Graz, Austria and is lead by the Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Göttingen, Germany. The support of the national funding agencies of Germany ( DLR , grant 50 QP 1801 ), France ( CNES ), Austria ( FWF , grant P26871-N20 ), Finland and the ESA Technical Directorate is gratefully acknowledged. We thank the Rosetta Science Ground Segment at ESAC, the Rosetta Mission Operations Centre at ESOC and the Rosetta Project at ESTEC for their outstanding work enabling the science return of the Rosetta Mission. Appendix A

Between Aug. 2014 and Sept. 2016, while ESA's cornerstone mission Rosetta was operating in the vicinity of the nucleus and in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the COSIMA instrument collected a large number of dust particles with diameters up to a millimeter. Positive or negative ions were detected by a time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometer (TOF-SIMS) and the composition of selected particles was deduced. Many of the negative ion mass spectra show, besides mass peaks at the correct position, an additional, extended contribution at the lower mass side caused by partial charging of the dust. This effect, usually avoided in SIMS applications, can in our case be used to obtain information on the electrical properties of the collected cometary dust particles, such as the specific resistivity (ρr>1.2⋅1010Ωm) and the real part of the relative electrical permittivity (εr<1.2). From these values a lower limit for the porosity is derived (P>0.8)., Funding details: Austrian Science Fund, FWF, P26871-N20; Funding details: Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, CNES; Funding details: Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR, 50 QP 1801; Funding text 1: COSIMA was built by a consortium led by the Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik, Garching, Germany in collaboration with Laboratoire de Physique et Chimie de l’Environnement et de l’Espace, Orléans, France, Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, CNRS/Université Paris Sud, Orsay, France, Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, Finland, Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany, von Hoerner und Sulger GmbH, Schwetzingen, Germany, Universität der Bundeswehr München, Neubiberg, Germany, Institut für Physik, Forschungszentrum Seibersdorf, Seibersdorf, Austria, Institut für Weltraumforschung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Graz, Austria and is lead by the Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Göttingen, Germany. The support of the national funding agencies of Germany ( DLR , grant 50 QP 1801 ), France ( CNES ), Austria ( FWF , grant P26871-N20 ), Finland and the ESA Technical Directorate is gratefully acknowledged. We thank the Rosetta Science Ground Segment at ESAC, the Rosetta Mission Operations Centre at ESOC and the Rosetta Project at ESTEC for their outstanding work enabling the science return of the Rosetta Mission. Appendix A

Before Rosetta, the space missions Giotto and Stardust shaped our view on cometary dust, supported by plentiful data from Earth based observations and interplanetary dust particles collected in the Earth's atmosphere. The Rosetta mission at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was equipped with a multitude of instruments designed to study cometary dust. While an abundant amount of data was presented in several individual papers, many focused on a dedicated measurement or topic. Different instruments, methods, and data sources provide different measurement parameters and potentially introduce different biases. This can be an advantage if the complementary aspect of such a complex data set can be exploited. However, it also poses a challenge in the comparison of results in the first place. The aim of this work therefore is to summarise dust results from Rosetta and before. We establish a simple classification as a common framework for inter-comparison. This classification is based on a dust particle's structure, porosity, and strength as well as its size. Depending on the instrumentation, these are not direct measurement parameters but we chose them as they were the most reliable to derive our model. The proposed classification already proved helpful in the Rosetta dust community and we propose to take it into consideration also beyond. In this manner we hope to better identify synergies between different instruments and methods in the future., Comment: accepted by A&A

Before Rosetta, the space missions Giotto and Stardust shaped our view on cometary dust, supported by plentiful data from Earth based observations and interplanetary dust particles collected in the Earth's atmosphere. The Rosetta mission at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was equipped with a multitude of instruments designed to study cometary dust. While an abundant amount of data was presented in several individual papers, many focused on a dedicated measurement or topic. Different instruments, methods, and data sources provide different measurement parameters and potentially introduce different biases. This can be an advantage if the complementary aspect of such a complex data set can be exploited. However, it also poses a challenge in the comparison of results in the first place. The aim of this work therefore is to summarise dust results from Rosetta and before. We establish a simple classification as a common framework for inter-comparison. This classification is based on a dust particle's structure, porosity, and strength as well as its size. Depending on the instrumentation, these are not direct measurement parameters but we chose them as they were the most reliable to derive our model. The proposed classification already proved helpful in the Rosetta dust community and we propose to take it into consideration also beyond. In this manner we hope to better identify synergies between different instruments and methods in the future., Comment: accepted by A&A

Before Rosetta, the space missions Giotto and Stardust shaped our view on cometary dust, supported by plentiful data from Earth based observations and interplanetary dust particles collected in the Earth's atmosphere. The Rosetta mission at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was equipped with a multitude of instruments designed to study cometary dust. While an abundant amount of data was presented in several individual papers, many focused on a dedicated measurement or topic. Different instruments, methods, and data sources provide different measurement parameters and potentially introduce different biases. This can be an advantage if the complementary aspect of such a complex data set can be exploited. However, it also poses a challenge in the comparison of results in the first place. The aim of this work therefore is to summarize dust results from Rosetta and before. We establish a simple classification as a common framework for intercomparison. This classification is based on the dust particle structure, porosity, and strength and also on its size. Depending on the instrumentation, these are not direct measurement parameters, but we chose them because they were the most reliable for deriving our model. The proposed classification has proved helpful in the Rosetta dust community, and we offer it here also for a broader context. In this manner, we hope to better identify synergies between different instruments and methods in the future.© C. Güttler et al. 2019

On 3 July 2016, several instruments on board ESA's Rosetta spacecraft detected signs of an outburst event on comet 67P, at a heliocentric distance of 3.32 AU from the sun, outbound from perihelion. We here report on the inferred properties of the ejected dust and the surface change at the site of the outburst. The activity coincided with the local sunrise and continued over a time interval of 14 - 68 minutes. It left a 10m-sized icy patch on the surface. The ejected material comprised refractory grains of several hundred microns in size, and sub-micron-sized water ice grains. The high dust mass production rate is incompatible with the free sublimation of crystalline water ice under solar illumination as the only acceleration process. Additional energy stored near the surface must have increased the gas density. We suggest a pressurized sub-surface gas reservoir, or the crystallization of amorphous water ice as possible causes., Comment: 20 pages, 19 figures, 5 tables

On 3 July 2016, several instruments on board ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft detected signs of an outburst event on comet 67P, at a heliocentric distance of 3.32 AU from the sun, outbound from perihelion. We here report on the inferred properties of the ejected dust and the surface change at the site of the outburst. The activity coincided with the local sunrise and continued over a time interval of 14 – 68 minutes. It left a 10m-sized icy patch on the surface. The ejected material comprised refractory grains of several hundred microns in size, and sub-micron-sized water ice grains. The high dust mass production rate is incompatible with the free sublimation of crystalline water ice under solar illumination as the only acceleration process. Additional energy stored near the surface must have increased the gas density. We suggest a pressurized sub-surface gas reservoir, or the crystallization of amorphous water ice as possible causes.

On 3 July 2016, several instruments on board ESA's Rosetta spacecraft detected signs of an outburst event on comet 67P, at a heliocentric distance of 3.32 AU from the sun, outbound from perihelion. We here report on the inferred properties of the ejected dust and the surface change at the site of the outburst. The activity coincided with the local sunrise and continued over a time interval of 14 - 68 minutes. It left a 10m-sized icy patch on the surface. The ejected material comprised refractory grains of several hundred microns in size, and sub-micron-sized water ice grains. The high dust mass production rate is incompatible with the free sublimation of crystalline water ice under solar illumination as the only acceleration process. Additional energy stored near the surface must have increased the gas density. We suggest a pressurized sub-surface gas reservoir, or the crystallization of amorphous water ice as possible causes., Comment: 20 pages, 19 figures, 5 tables

On 2016 July 03, several instruments onboard ESA's Rosetta spacecraft detected signs of an outburst event on comet 67P, at a heliocentric distance of 3.32 au from the Sun, outbound from perihelion. We here report on the inferred properties of the ejected dust and the surface change at the site of the outburst. The activity coincided with the local sunrise and continued over a time interval of 14-68 min. It left a 10-m-sized icy patch on the surface. The ejected material comprised refractory grains of several hundred microns in size, and sub-micron-sized water ice grains. The high dust mass production rate is incompatible with the free sublimation of crystalline water ice under solar illumination as the only acceleration process. Additional energy stored near the surface must have increased the gas density. We suggest a pressurized sub-surface gas reservoir, or the crystallization of amorphous water ice as possible causes.© 2015 The Authors.