Abstract
The Rosetta mission will begin its comet rendezvous and lander mission in mid 2014. The plasma instruments onboard Rosetta will provide detailed measurements of the plasma environment of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and its responses to solar wind interaction. In this chapter the basic scale lengths connected to the dimension of the radial-expanding magnetic field-free ionosphere and to the boundary separating photoelectrons cooled by collisional interaction with water molecules, respectively, are explained. Their variations at different heliocentric distances along the orbit of comet 67P are described. It is found that the radii of the diamagnetic ionospheric cavity (∼35 km at perihelion) and that of the cold photoelectron zone (∼350 km at perihelion) are all much smaller than those of comet Halley. These theoretical estimates will be tested by the upcoming in situ plasma measurements and remote-sensing observations onboard the Rosetta spacecraft.
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Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Prof. Shuanggen Jin for giving the opportunity of producing this paper. The useful discussions and comments from Prof. Monio Kartalev, Prof. Vladimir Baranov, Prof. Susan McKenna-Lawlor, Dr. Martin Rubin, and Dr. Christoph Koenders, at the ISSI team meetings on Modeling cometary environments in the context of the heritage of the Giotto mission to comet Halley and of forthcoming new observations at Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, are gratefully acknowledged. This work was partially supported by NSC 102-211-M-008-014 and Project 019/2010/A2 of the Macau Science and Technology Development Fund: MSAR No. 0166.
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Ip, WH. (2015). Estimates of the Size of the Ionosphere of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko During Its Perihelion Passage in 2014/2015. In: Jin, S., Haghighipour, N., Ip, WH. (eds) Planetary Exploration and Science: Recent Results and Advances. Springer Geophysics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45052-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45052-9_10
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