Encounter of theUlyssesSpacecraft with the Ion Tail of Comet McNaught
Citations Over TimeTop 13% of 2007 papers
Abstract
Comet McNaught was the brightest comet observed from Earth in the last 40 years. For a period of five days in early 2007 February, four instruments on the Ulysses spacecraft directly measured cometary ions and key properties of the interaction of the comet's ion tail with the high-speed solar wind from the polar regions of the Sun. Because of the record-breaking duration of the encounter, the data are unusually comprehensive. O3+ ions were detected for the first time in a comet tail, coexisting with singly charged molecular ions with masses in the range 28-35 amu. The presence of magnetic turbulence and of ions with energies up to ~200 keV indicate that at a distance of ~1.6 AU from the comet nucleus, the ion tail of comet McNaught had not yet reached equilibrium with the surrounding solar wind.
Related Papers
- → Trajectories of charged dust grains in the cometary environment(1985)141 cited
- → All comets are born equal: infrared emission by dust as a key to comet nucleus composition fn2 fn2Presented in the Workshop on the Rosetta Targets—46P/Wirtanen: Observations, Modeling and Future Work, 10–11 December 1997, Napoli, Italy.(1999)19 cited
- → Comet Halley: A carrier of interstellar dust chemical evolution(1987)14 cited
- Cometary environments; Proceedings of Symposium 5, Workshop IV, and Topical Meeting of the 27th COSPAR Plenary Meeting, Espoo, Finland, July 18-29, 1988(1989)
- → Comet Dust: Connections with Interstellar Dust(1989)