Cometary dust collected by MIDAS on board Rosetta. I. Dust particle catalog and statistics

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive catalog and statistical analysis of 3523 cometary dust particles collected by MIDAS on Rosetta, including size distribution, shape descriptors, and fragmentation analysis, enhancing understanding of cometary dust properties.

Contribution

The study significantly improves the MIDAS dust particle catalog through re-analysis, adding detailed properties and new statistical insights into cometary dust particle size and shape distributions.

Findings

Catalog includes 3523 particles, 1857 suitable for analysis.

Particle sizes range from 40 nm to 8 μm.

Size distribution follows a power law with index -1.67 to -1.88.

Abstract

We aim to catalog all dust particles collected and analyzed by MIDAS, together with their main statistical properties such as size, height, basic shape descriptors, and collection time. Furthermore, we aim to present the scientific results that can be extracted from the catalog (e.g., the size distribution and statistical characteristics of cometary dust particles). The existing MIDAS particle catalog has been greatly improved by a careful re-analysis of the AFM images, leading to the addition of more dust particles and a detailed description of the particle properties. The catalog documents all images of identified dust particles and includes a variety of derived information tabulated one record per particle. Furthermore, the best image of each particle was chosen for subsequent studies. Finally, we created dust coverage maps and clustering maps of the MIDAS collection targets and traced any possible fragmentation of collected particles with a detailed algorithm. The revised MIDAS catalog includes 3523 MIDAS particles in total, where 1857 particles are expected to be usable for further analysis (418 scans of particles before perihelion + 1439 scans of particles after perihelion, both after the removal of duplicates), ranging from about 40 nm to about 8 ${\mu}$m in size. The mean value of the equivalent radius derived from the 2D projection of the particles is 0.91 ${\pm}$ 0.79 ${\mu}$m. A slightly improved equivalent radius based on the particle's volume coincides in the range of uncertainties with a value of 0.56 ${\pm}$ 0.45 ${\mu}$m. We note that those sizes and all following MIDAS particle size distributions are expected to be influenced by the fragmentation of MIDAS particles upon impact on the collection targets. Furthermore, fitting the slope of the MIDAS particle size distribution with a power law of a r ${^b}$ yields an index b of ${\sim}$ -1.67 to -1.88.