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Investigating short-time-scale variations in cometary ions around comet 67P

Stenberg Wieser, G; Odelstad, E; Wieser, M; Nilsson, H; Goetz, C; Karlsson, T; André, M; ... Gunell, H; + view all (2017) Investigating short-time-scale variations in cometary ions around comet 67P. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , 469 (S2) S522-S534. 10.1093/mnras/stx2133. Green open access

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Abstract

The highly varying plasma environment around comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko inspired an upgrade of the ion mass spectrometer (Rosetta Plasma Consortium Ion Composition Analyzer) with new operation modes, to enable high time resolution measurements of cometary ions. Two modes were implemented, one having a 4 s time resolution in the energy range 0.3–82 eV/q and the other featuring a 1 s time resolution in the energy range 13–50 eV/q. Comparing measurements made with the two modes, it was concluded that 4 s time resolution is enough to capture most of the fast changes of the cometary ion environment. The 1462 h of observations done with the 4 s mode were divided into hour-long sequences. It is possible to sort 84 per cent of these sequences into one of five categories, depending on their appearance in an energy–time spectrogram. The ion environment is generally highly dynamic, and variations in ion fluxes and energies are seen on time-scales of 10 s to several minutes.

Type: Article
Title: Investigating short-time-scale variations in cometary ions around comet 67P
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stx2133
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx2133
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: plasmas, instrumentation: detectors, methods: data analysis, methods: statistical, space vehicles: instruments, comets: individual: 67P
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Space and Climate Physics
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10043862
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