Journal
ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS
Volume 583, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
EDP SCIENCES S A
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201526094
Keywords
comets: individual: 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko; radio lines: planetary systems; submillimeter: planetary systems; comets: general
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Funding
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfarht and Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
- CNES
- CNRS/Institut des Sciences de l'Univers
- Taiwanese National Science Counsel [NSC 101-2111-M-008-016]
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The Microwave Instrument on the Rosetta Orbiter (MIRO) has been observing the coma of comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko almost continuously since June 2014 at wavelengths near 0.53 mm. We present here a map of the water column density in the inner coma (within 3 km from nucleus center) when the comet was at 3.4 AU from the Sun. Based on the analysis of the (H2O)-O-16 and (H2O)-O-18 (110-101) lines, we find that the column density can vary by two orders of magnitude in this region. The highest column density is observed in a narrow region on the dayside, close to the neck and north pole rotation axis of the nucleus, while the lowest column density is seen against the nightside of the nucleus where outgassing seems to be very low. We estimate that the outgassing pattern can be represented by a Gaussian distribution in a solid angle with FWHM approximate to 80 degrees.
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