Project Description
The ISSI comet Modeling Team is working to complete a five-year plan to generate a versatile suite of comet environment models for both weak and active comets. One of the primary goals of the team is to generate a set of comet environment engineering models for comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the target of the Rosetta mission. Such models are necessary for planning mission operations and data interpretation. The environmental models will be validated (to the extent possible) with remote observations of the target comet and of other comets as well as with in-situ observations from previous comet missions. This will give us more confidence in the engineering environmental models for the new Rosetta target comet.
In addition to the application of our tool for mission planning purposes, we are working particularly to improving our scientific understanding of the comet's coma, the comet solar wind interaction, cometary ion chemistry, and cometary high energy processes, through a combination of state-of-the-art modeling with analysis of observations of cometary environments.
The ongoing comet modeling program is unique in that our combined efforts address the full range of cometary coma phenomena with state-of-the-art numerical simulation codes, and in that we have extensive experience in applying these codes directly to the analysis of observations. The models developed by members of the proposing team are powerful tools for studying the behavior of gas, plasma and dust flows from the vicinity of the nucleus out to the collisionless expansion region. Our overall goal is to advance the understanding of the spatial distribution and dynamics of observed neutral and plasma species and dust in the comae and tails of comets and how they vary from comet to comet, with the activity level of the comet, and with time, orbital position and solar conditions.