1. Surface temperature of the nucleus of Comet 9P/Tempel 1
- Author
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Jian-Yang Li, W. A. Delamere, Lori M. Feaga, Tony L. Farnham, Jessica M. Sunshine, Olivier Groussin, Peter C. Thomas, Carey M. Lisse, Karen J. Meech, and Michael F. A'Hearn
- Subjects
Physics ,Effective radius ,Spectrometer ,business.industry ,Comet ,Infrared spectroscopy ,Astronomy and Astrophysics ,Astrophysics ,Light curve ,Spectral line ,medicine.anatomical_structure ,Optics ,Space and Planetary Science ,Comet nucleus ,medicine ,business ,Nucleus - Abstract
The Deep Impact (DI) spacecraft encountered Comet 9P/Tempel 1 on July 4th, 2005 and observed it with several instruments. In particular, we obtained infrared spectra of the nucleus with the HRI-IR spectrometer in the wavelength range of 1.0–4.9 μm. The data were taken before impact, with a maximum resolution of ∼120 m per pixel at the time of observation. From these spectra, we derived the first directly observed temperature map of a comet nucleus. The surface temperature varied from 272 ± 7 to 336 ± 7 K on the sunlit hemisphere, matching the surface topography and incidence angle. The derived thermal inertia is low, most probably
- Published
- 2007
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