Dust particle flux and size distribution in the coma of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko measured in situ by the COSIMA instrument on board Rosetta

Abstract

Context. The COmetary Secondary Ion Mass Analyzer (COSIMA) on board Rosetta is dedicated to the collection and compositional analysis of the dust particles in the coma of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P). Aims. Investigation of the physical properties of the dust particles collected along the comet trajectory around the Sun starting at a heliocentric distance of 3.5 AU. Methods. The flux, size distribution, and morphology of the dust particles collected in the vicinity of the nucleus of comet 67P were measured with a daily to weekly time resolution. Results. The particles collected by COSIMA can be classified according to their morphology into two main types: compact particles and porous aggregates. In low-resolution images, the porous material appears similar to the chondritic-porous interplanetary dust particles collected in Earth's stratosphere in terms of texture. We show that this porous material represents 75% in volume and 50% in number of the large dust particles collected by COSIMA. Compact particles have typical sizes from a few tens of microns to a few hundreds of microns, while porous aggregates can be as large as a millimeter. The particles are not collected as a continuous flow but appear in bursts. This could be due to limited time resolution and/or fragmentation either in the collection funnel or few meters away from the spacecraft. The average collection rate of dust particles as a function of nucleo-centric distance shows that, at high phase angle, the dust flux follows a 1/d 2 comet law, excluding fragmentation of the dust particles along their journey to the spacecraft. At low phase angle, the dust flux is much more dispersed compared to the 1/d 2 comet law but cannot be explained by fragmentation of the particles along their trajectory since their velocity, indirectly deduced from the COSIMA data, does not support such a phenomenon. The cumulative size distribution of particles larger than 150 µm follows a power law close to r −0.8±0.1 , confirming measurements made by another Rosetta dust instrument Grain Impact Analyser and Dust Accumulator (GIADA). The cumulative size distribution of particles between 30 µm and 150 µm has a power index of −1.9 ± 0.3. The excess of dust in the 10-100 µm range in comparison to the 100 µm-1 mm range together with no evidence for fragmentation in the inner coma, implies that these particles could have been released or fragmented at the nucleus right after lift-off of larger particles. Below 30 µm, particles exhibit a flat size distribution. We interprete this knee in the size distribution at small sizes as the consequence of strong binding forces between the sub-constitutents. For aggregates smaller than 30 µm, forces stronger than Van-der-Waals forces would be needed to break them apart.

Solar-insolation-induced changes in the coma morphology of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

“…Therefore, as the new fresh surfaces became active, it would not be surprising for the properties of the dust particles to also change. However, no significant changes in dust flux or size distribution were reported by the Rosetta dust analysis instrument COSIMA (Langevin et al 2016;Merouane et al 2016), which could however be due to either low statistics or the fact that ground-based dust observations focus on much smaller particles than those collected by the COSIMA instrument. In our data, we observe an extremely curved subsolar jet around the perihelion (see Fig.…”

Searching for calcium‐aluminum‐rich inclusions in cometary particles with Rosetta/COSIMA

“…() and Merouane et al. (). While, as of December 2015 over 10,000 particles have been collected, only a small fraction has thus far been subjected to secondary ion mass spectrometry.…”

“…; Merouane et al. ). Particles smaller than about 10 μm cannot be imaged by COSISCOPE (which has a 14 μm pixel size).…”

Composition of cometary particles collected during two periods of the Rosetta mission: multivariate evaluation of mass spectral data

“…A built‐in microscope made images from the targets with a resolution of 14 μm and 1024 × 1024 pixel. In total, about 1400 particles (corresponding to about 30 000 particle fragments) have been documented from the obtained images . The typical particle diameter is 50 to 700 μm; the particle areas have a median of 390 μm 2 and a maximum of 0.5 mm 2 .…”

“…This mass resolution allows a separation of elemental ions from H‐rich carbon containing ions of the same nominal (integer) mass in this mass range. More details of the data collection for the COSIMA instrument are presented in Merouane et al…”