The dust-to-gas ratio, size distribution, and dust fall-back fraction of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko: Inferences from linking the optical and dynamical properties of the inner comae

TL;DR

This study models the dust and gas emissions of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko during the Rosetta mission, constraining dust size distribution, dust-to-gas ratio, and mass loss rates through simulations and observational data comparison.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive 3D simulation approach linking optical and dynamical properties to constrain cometary dust and gas parameters.

Findings

Total volatile mass loss during 2015 was (6.1 ± 1.5) × 10^9 kg.

Dust ejection follows a power-law with index ~3.7.

Dust-to-gas ratio for escaping material is approximately 0.73.

Abstract

In this work, we present results that simultaneously constrain the dust size distribution, dust-to-gas ratio, fraction of dust re-deposition, and total mass production rates for comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. We use a 3D Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) gas dynamics code to simulate the inner gas coma of the comet for the duration of the Rosetta mission. The gas model is constrained by ROSINA/COPS data. Further, we simulate for different epochs the inner dust coma using a 3D dust dynamics code including gas drag and the nucleus' gravity. Using advanced dust scattering properties these results are used to produce synthetic images that can be compared to the OSIRIS data set. These simulations allow us to constrain the properties of the dust coma and the total gas and dust production rates. We determined a total volatile mass loss of $(6.1 \pm 1.5) \cdot 10^9$~kg during the 2015 apparition. Further, we found that power-laws with $q=3.7^{+0.57}_{-0.078}$ are consistent with the data. This results in a total of $5.1^{+6.0}_{-4.9}\cdot10^9$~kg of dust being ejected from the nucleus surface, of which $4.4^{+4.9}_{-4.2}\cdot10^9$~kg escape to space and $6.8^{+11}_{-6.8}\cdot10^8$~kg (or an equivalent of $14^{+22}_{-14}$~cm over the smooth regions) is re-deposited on the surface. This leads to a dust-to-gas ratio of $0.73^{+1.3}_{-0.70}$ for the escaping material and $0.84^{+1.6}_{-0.81}$ for the ejected material. We have further found that the smallest dust size must be strictly smaller than $\sim30\mu$m and nominally even smaller than $\sim12\mu$m.