73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3-B observed from the optical ground station

Aims.In 2006 comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, which split in 1995 into five pieces, approached the Sun again with a swarm of new fragments. The same year in May, the conglomerate of sub-fragments from the original fragment B was observed with the S-Cam3 instrument mounted on the 1-m ESA Optical Ground Station (OGS) telescope in Tenerife, Spain. With a total FOV of ~876 km $\times$730 km and a spatial resolution of ~73 km/pixel, the S-Cam3 observations provided the possibility to examine dust fragmentation processes, as well as dust and gas outflow, within the first few hundred kilometres of the sub-fragment surfaces.