A first assessment of the strength of cometary particles collected in-situ by the COSIMA instrument onboard ROSETTA

Klaus Hornung (1) , Sihane Merouane (2) , Martin Hilchenbach (2) , Yves Langevin (3) , Eva Maria Mellado (1) , Vincenzo Della Corte (4) , Jochen Kissel (2) , Cecile Engrand (5) , Rita Schulz (6) , Jouni Ryno (7) , Johan Silen (7) , The Cosima Team (8)

1 LRT-7 - Institut für Strömungsmechanik und Aerodynamik
2 MPS - Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung
3 IAS - Institut d'astrophysique spatiale
4 IAPS - Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali - INAF
5 CSNSM AS - Centre de Sciences Nucléaires et de Sciences de la Matière
6 ESA Scientific Support Office
7 Finnish Meteorological Institute Observation Services
8 LPC2E - Laboratoire de Physique et Chimie de l'Environnement et de l'Espace

Soon after the arrival of the ROSETTA spacecraft at Comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko the onboard instrument COSIMA (“Cometary Secondary Ion Mass Analyzer”) collected a large number of cometary dust particles on targets from gold black of thickness between 10 and 30 μm. Inspection by its camera subsystem revealed that many of them consist of smaller units of typically some tens of micrometers in size. The collection process left the smaller dust particles in an essentially unaltered state whereas most particles larger than about 100 μm got fragmented into smaller pieces. Using the observed fragment size distributions, the present paper includes a first assessment of the strength for those dust particles that were disrupted upon impact.

Keywords: Cometary dust; Mechanical strength; Impact fragmentation; Rosetta mission

Domains: Astrophysics [astro-ph]

Klaus Hornung, Sihane Merouane, Martin Hilchenbach, Yves Langevin, Eva Maria Mellado, et al.. A first assessment of the strength of cometary particles collected in-situ by the COSIMA instrument onboard ROSETTA. Planetary and Space Science, 2016, 133, pp.63-75. ⟨10.1016/j.pss.2016.07.003⟩. ⟨insu-01351370⟩