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Register a new userThe footprint of cometary dust analogues: II. Morphology as a tracer of tensile strength and application to dust collection by the Rosetta spacecraft
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The structure of cometary dust is a tracer of growth processes in the formation of planetesimals. Instrumentation on board the Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko captured dust particles and analysed them in situ. However, these deposits are a product of a collision within the instrument. We conducted laboratory experiments with cometary dust analogues, simulating the collection process by Rosetta instruments (specifically COSIMA, MIDAS). In Paper I we reported that velocity is a key driver in determining the appearance of deposits. Here in Paper II we use materials with different monomer sizes, and study the effect of tensile strength on the appearance of deposits. We find that mass transfer efficiency increases from $sim$1 up to $sim$10% with increasing monomer diameter from 0.3 $mu$m to 1.5 $mu$m (i.e. tensile strength decreasing from $sim$12 to $sim$3 kPa), and velocities increasing from 0.5 to 6 m/s. Also, the relative abundance of small fragments after impact is higher for material with higher tensile strength. The degeneracy between the effects of velocity and material strength may be lifted by performing a closer study of the deposits. This experimental method makes it possible to estimate the mass transfer efficiency in the COSIMA instrument. Extrapolating these results implies that more than half of the dust collected during the Rosetta mission has not been imaged. We analysed two COSIMA targets containing deposits from single collisions. The collision that occurred closest to perihelion passage led to more small fragments on the target.
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Comets are thought to have information about the formation process of our solar system. Recently, detailed information about comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has been found by a spacecraft mission Rosetta. It is remarkable that its tensile strength was estimated. In this paper, we measure and formulate the tensile strength of porous dust aggregates using numerical simulations, motivated by porous dust aggregation model of planetesimal formation. We perform three-dimensional numerical simulations using a monomer interaction model with periodic boundary condition. We stretch out a dust aggregate with a various initial volume filling factor between $10^{-2}$ and 0.5. We find that the tensile stress takes the maximum value at the time when the volume filling factor decreases to about a half of the initial value. The maximum stress is defined to be the tensile strength. We take an average of the results with 10 different initial shapes to smooth out the effects of initial shapes of aggregates. Finally, we numerically obtain the relation between the tensile strength and the initial volume filling factor of dust aggregates. We also use a simple semi-analytical model and successfully reproduce the numerical results, which enables us to apply to a wide parameter range and different materials. The obtained relation is consistent with previous experiments and numerical simulations about silicate dust aggregates. We estimate that the monomer radius of comet 67P has to be about 3.3--220 $mathrm{mu m}$ to reproduce its tensile strength using our model.
Cometary dust provides a unique window on dust growth mechanisms during the onset of planet formation. Measurements by the Rosetta spacecraft show that the dust in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has a granular structure at size scales from sub-um up to several hundreds of um, indicating hierarchical growth took place across these size scales. However, these dust particles may have been modified during their collection by the spacecraft instruments. Here we present the results of laboratory experiments that simulate the impact of dust on the collection surfaces of COSIMA and MIDAS, instruments onboard the Rosetta spacecraft. We map the size and structure of the footprints left by the dust particles as a function of their initial size (up to several hundred um) and velocity (up to 6 m/s). We find that in most collisions, only part of the dust particle is left on the target; velocity is the main driver of the appearance of these deposits. A boundary between sticking/bouncing and fragmentation as an outcome of the particle-target collision is found at v ~ 2 m/s. For velocities below this value, particles either stick and leave a single deposit on the target plate, or bounce, leaving a shallow footprint of monomers. At velocities > 2 m/s and sizes > 80 um, particles fragment upon collision, transferring up to 50 per cent of their mass in a rubble-pile-like deposit on the target plate. The amount of mass transferred increases with the impact velocity. The morphologies of the deposits are qualitatively similar to those found by the COSIMA instrument.
Cometary meteoroid trails exist in the vicinity of comets, forming fine structure of the interplanetary dust cloud. The trails consist predominantly of cometary particles with sizes of approximately 0.1 mm to 1 cm which are ejected at low speeds and remain very close to the comet orbit for several revolutions around the Sun. When re-analysing the Helios dust data measured in the 1970s, Altobelli et al. (2006) recognized a clustering of seven impacts, detected in a very narrow region of space at a true anomaly angle of 135 deg, which the authors considered as potential cometary trail particles. We re-analyse these candidate cometary trail particles to investigate the possibility that some or all of them indeed originate from cometary trails and we constrain their source comets. The Interplanetary Meteoroid Environment for eXploration (IMEX) dust streams in space model is a new universal model for cometary meteoroid streams in the inner solar system, developed by Soja et al. (2015). Using IMEX we study cometary trail traverses by Helios. During ten revolutions around the Sun, and in the narrow region of space where Helios detected the candidate dust particles, the spacecraft repeatedly traversed the trails of comets 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajduvsakova and 72P/Denning-Fujikawa. Based on the detection times and particle impact directions, four detected particles are compatible with an origin from these two comets. We find a dust spatial density in these trails of about 10^-8 to 10^-7 m^-3. The in-situ detection and analysis of meteoroid trail particles which can be traced back to their source bodies by spacecraft-based dust analysers opens a new window to remote compositional analysis of comets and asteroids without the necessity to fly a spacecraft to or even land on those celestial bodies. This provides new science opportunities for future missions like Destiny+, Europa Clipper and IMAP.
Dust jets, i.e. fuzzy collimated streams of cometary material arising from the nucleus, have been observed in-situ on all comets since the Giotto mission flew by comet 1P/Halley in 1986. Yet their formation mechanism remains unknown. Several solutions have been proposed, from localized physical mechanisms on the surface/sub-surface (see review in Belton (2010)) to purely dynamical processes involving the focusing of gas flows by the local topography (Crifo et al. 2002). While the latter seems to be responsible for the larger features, high resolution imagery has shown that broad streams are composed of many smaller features (a few meters wide) that connect directly to the nucleus surface. We monitored these jets at high resolution and over several months to understand what are the physical processes driving their formation, and how this affects the surface. Using many images of the same areas with different viewing angles, we performed a 3-dimensional reconstruction of collimated jets, and linked them precisely to their sources on the nucleus. Results.We show here observational evidence that the Northern hemisphere jets of comet 67P arise from areas with sharp topographic changes and describe the physical processes involved. We propose a model in which active cliffs are the main source of jet-like features, and therefore the regions eroding the fastest on comets. We suggest that this is a common mechanism taking place on all comets.
Tiny meteoroids entering the Earths atmosphere and inducing meteor showers have long been thought to originate partly from cometary dust. Together with other dust particles, they form a huge cloud around the Sun, the zodiacal cloud. From our previous studies of the zodiacal light, as well as other independent methods (dynamical studies, infrared observations, data related to Earths environment), it is now established that a significant fraction of dust particles entering the Earths atmosphere comes from Jupiter-family comets (JFCs). This paper relies on our understanding of key properties of the zodiacal cloud and of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, extensively studied by the Rosetta mission to a JFC. The interpretation, through numerical and experimental simulations of zodiacal light local polarimetric phase curves, has recently allowed us to establish that interplanetary dust is rich in absorbing organics and consists of fluffy particles. The ground-truth provided by Rosetta presently establishes that the cometary dust particles are rich in organic compounds and consist of quite fluffy and irregular aggregates. Our aims are as follows: (1) to make links, back in time, between peculiar micrometeorites, tiny meteoroids, interplanetary dust particles, cometary dust particles, and the early evolution of the Solar System, and (2) to show how detailed studies of such meteoroids and of cometary dust particles can improve the interpretation of observations of dust in protoplanetary and debris disks. Future modeling of dust in such disks should favor irregular porous particles instead of more conventional compact spherical particles.
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