Comet 1P/Halley multifluid MHD model for the Giotto fly-by

The interaction of comets with the solar wind has been the focus of many studies including numerical modeling. We compare the results of our multifluid MHD simulation of comet 1P/Halley to data obtained during the flyby of the European Space Agency's Giotto spacecraft in 1986. The model solves the full set of MHD equations for the individual fluids representing the solar wind protons, the cometary light and heavy ions, and the electrons. The mass loading, charge-exchange, dissociative ion-electron recombination, and collisional interactions between the fluids are taken into account. The computational domain spans over several million kilometers, and the close vicinity of the comet is resolved to the details of the magnetic cavity. The model is validated by comparison to the corresponding Giotto observations obtained by the Ion Mass Spectrometer, the Neutral Mass Spectrometer, the Giotto magnetometer experiment, and the Johnstone Plasma Analyzer instrument. The model shows the formation of the bow shock, the ion pile-up, and the diamagnetic cavity and is able to reproduce the observed temperature differences between the pick-up ion populations and the solar wind protons. We give an overview of the global interaction of the comet with the solar wind and then show the effects of the Lorentz force interaction between the different plasma populations.

Molecular oxygen in oort cloud comet 1P/Halley

Recently, the ROSINA mass spectrometer suite on board the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft discovered an abundant amount of molecular oxygen, O2, in the coma of Jupiter family comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko of O2/H2O = 3.80 ± 0.85%. It could be shown that O2 is indeed a parent species and that the derived abundances point to a primordial origin. Crucial questions are whether the O2 abundance is peculiar to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko or Jupiter family comets in general, and also whether Oort cloud comets such as comet 1P/Halley contain similar amounts of molecular oxygen. We investigated mass spectra obtained by the Neutral Mass Spectrometer instrument during the flyby by the European Space Agency's Giotto probe of comet 1P/Halley. Our investigation indicates that a production rate of O2 of 3.7 ± 1.7% with respect to water is indeed compatible with the obtained Halley data and therefore that O2 might be a rather common and abundant parent species.

Relativistic description of 3He(e,e'p)2H

The relativistic distorted-wave impulse approximation is used to describe the 3He(e, e′ p)2H process. We describe the 3He nucleus within the adiabatic hyperspherical expansion method with realistic nucleon-nucleon interactions. The overlap between the 3He and the deuteron wave functions can be accurately computed from a three-body calculation. The nucleons are described by solutions of the Dirac equation with scalar and vector (S–V) potentials. The wave function of the outgoing proton is obtained by solving the Dirac equation with a S–V optical potential fitted to elastic proton scattering data on the residual nucleus. Within this theoretical framework, we compute the cross section of the reaction and other observables like the transverse-longitudinal asymmetry, and compare them with the available experimental data measured at JLab.