To enhance the scientific return of the mission, it is desired to gain knowledge of basic properties of the cometary environment through the interpretation and analysis of the spacecraft data.
Two months later a paper on the nature of the cometary nucleus by Fred Whipple would do the same for cometary physics.
"It more than doubles our knowledge of the cometary population," Dr. Yeomans said.
The composition of the cometary coma varies with heliocentric distance.
Furthermore, the considered list of the cometary materials is surely not a complete.
The blistering heat of the sun--which cooks the moon's surface to about 120 degrees Celsius--should have boiled off much of the cometary water.
Images of the emission spatial distribution of the cometary atmosphere are obtained.
A broad review of the cometary magnetosphere will be given in this paper.
One can see that we have managed to fit the cometary photopolarimetric data rather well.
A first list of molecules identified on the cometary nucleus by COSAC, authored by Meierhenrich and colleagues, will be published at the end of July in the journal Science.
