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Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited., We directly measured twenty overhanging cliffs on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko extracted from the latest shape model and estimated the minimum tensile strengths needed to support them against collapse under the comet's gravity. We find extremely low strengths of around 1 Pa or less (1 to 5 Pa, when scaled to a metre length). The presence of eroded material at the base of most overhangs, as well as the observed collapse of two features and the implied previous collapse of another, suggests that they are prone to failure and that the true material strengths are close to these lower limits (although we only consider static stresses and not dynamic stress from, for example, cometary activity). Thus, a tensile strength of a few pascals is a good approximation for the tensile strength of the 67P nucleus material, which is in agreement with previous work. We find no particular trends in overhang properties either with size over the ~10-100 m range studied here or location on the nucleus. There are no obvious differences, in terms of strength, height or evidence of collapse, between the populations of overhangs on the two cometary lobes, suggesting that 67P is relatively homogenous in terms of tensile strength. Low material strengths are supportive of cometary formation as a primordial rubble pile or by collisional fragmentation of a small body (tens of km)., his project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 686709. This work was supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract number 16.0008-2. The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official view of the Swiss Government. OSIRIS was built by a consortium of the Max-Planck-Institut fur Sonnensystemforschung, Gottingen, Germany; the CISAS University of Padova, Italy; the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, France; the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, CSIC, Granada, the Universidad Politechnica de Madrid, Spain; the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Uppsala University, Sweden; and the Institut fur Datentechnik und Kommunikationsnetze der Technischen Universitat Braunschweig, Germany. The support of the national funding agencies of Germany (DLR), France (CNES), Italy (ASI), Spain (MEC), Sweden (SNSB), and the ESA Technical Directorate is gratefully acknowledged. We thank the Rosetta Science Operations Centre and the Rosetta Mission Operations Centre for the successful rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The Analyzer of Space Plasmas and Energetic Atoms (ASPERA‐4) instrument on Venus Express is used to determine bow shock position at Venus using ion data alone, using data recorded during a solar minimum from the Ion Mass Analyzer (IMA) which is part of the ASPERA‐4 package. Previous models constructed from solar minimum data using Venus Express, Pioneer Venus Orbiter (PVO) and Venera 9 and 10 are also compared to the current fit. An important feature of this new fit is a statistical accuracy introduced in the form of a probability weighting function for the data points, based on the time spent in particular locations. The bow shock curve is then compared to two‐dimensional ion maps. These verify the accuracy of this and previous solar minimum fit curves based on PVO and Venus Express magnetic data. Comparing all bow shock models to the 2D ion maps shows that a combination of models produces the best fit. Since all the fitted curves show differences in position they are investigated relative to the solar conditions pertaining at the times when the individual data sets were measured. The sub solar point and terminator distance were thus found to vary linearly with sunspot number and hence with solar activity. This relationship, which was already known to exist between solar maximum and solar minimum, is now shown to exist between different solar minima and even within the same minimum. This indicates a need for the mechanisms for bow shock maintenance and variance to be more closely modeled.

The German initiative for the Lunar Exploration Orbiter (LEO) originated from the national conference “Exploration of our Solar System”, held in Dresden in November 2006. Major result of this conference was that the Moon is of high interest for the scientific community for various reasons, it is affordable to perform an orbiting mission to Moon and it insures technological and scientific progress necessary to assist further exploration activities of our Solar System. Based on scientific proposals elaborated by 50 German scientists in January 2007, a preliminary payload of 12 instruments was defined. Further analysis were initated by DLR in the frame of two industry contracts, to perform a phase-zero mission definition. The Moon, our next neighbour in the Solar System is the first choice to learn, how to work and live without the chance of immediate support from earth and to get prepared for further and farther exploration missions. We have to improve our scientific knowledge base with respect to the Moon applying modern and state of the art research tools and methods. LEO is planed to be launched in 2012 and shall orbit the Moon for about four years in a low altitude orbit.

Contribution presented at the 39th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Association (DPS 2007), October 7-12, 2007 Orlando, Florida., When Deep Impact fired its projectile into the nucleus of comet 9P/Tempel 1, a cloud made of dust and icy grains was ejected from the impact crater. The dust was subsequently accelerated by gas drag. About a week after the impact event, the dust cloud has dispersed due to its expansion and the force exerted by solar radiation pressure. The light curve of the dust cloud contains information about its formation and evolution: the time scale of the production of impact created material can be derived from the time scale of the brightness increase. The velocity distribution of the cloud is indicative of acceleration processes in the inner coma of the comet. Finally, the abundance of large dust particles created by the impact can be estimated from the brightness of the cloud several days after the impact when small particles have been pushed away by radiation pressure., Here we analyze data obtained by the Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of OSIRIS onboard the ESA spacecraft Rosetta to derive the velocity distribution of the dust cloud from an inversion of its light curve. OSIRIS observed comet Tempel 1 near-continuously for more than two weeks around the impact. A model of the expansion of the ejecta is compared to the light curve seen by the NAC. We derive a broad velocity distribution of the dust particles, which peaks at around 225 m/s, in good agreement with published estimates. The velocity suggest that the impact ejecta were quickly accelerated by gas in the cometary coma. We will discuss implications of our results for the evolution of the dust cloud during the first hours after the impact and provide estimates of the released dust mass., We acknowledge the funding of the agencies ASI, CNES, DLR, the Spanish Space Program (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia), SNSB and ESA.