Localizing the Source of Gas Streams on Comet 67P by Detecting Short-Term Variation of H2O/CO2 Emission Obtained with the Rosetta VIRTIS-H Spectrograph
Ya-Lin Wu (National Taiwan Normal University)
Yu-Chi Cheng (National Taiwan Normal University)
Description:
Rosetta mission is a legendary comet mission in the 21 century. The in-situ observation together with the Philae lander uncovered the mystery of the cometary nucleus of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The VIRTIS-H is a spectrograph onboard the Rosetta orbiter which provides moderate-resolution (R~800) near-infrared spectra (2~5 micron) and was designed for studying the chemical abundances and space distribution of the inner atmosphere (d<100 km) of comet 67P. So far, all the VIRTIS-H spectra are already released to the public. In this project, we propose using the VIRTIS-H data to search for the short-term variation of H2O/CO2 emission and indicate the morphology and possible source region of narrow gas streams from the cometary nucleus. The narrow jet is a short-living phenomenon (<1 hour) which had observed by the Rosetta OSIRIS instrument in the optical bandpass. We can better characterize the nature of cometary outbursts by combing the measurement from multiple instruments.
Background requirement:
basic Linux operation, ability to read/write python scripts