Planetary Systems : Comets & Asteroids
Chemical composition of comets
Near Earth Objects
Kuiper belt
Anita Cochran, Judit Györgyey Ries, Peter J Shelus
 | Assistant Director Research Interests Primitive bodies in the solar system; chemical composition of comets; the Kuiper belt, CONTOUR Mission Science Team. | |
 | Research Associate Research Interests Planetary Astronomy, Astrometry and physical characterization of Near Earth Objects, especially Earth-crossing asteroids. | |
 | Senior Research Scientist Research Interests Small Solar System body motions; time: laser ranging; Earth and lunar dynamics; stellar astrometry. Group Areas | |
The evolution of the gas with time. The counts above the continuum were integrated along the entire 7 arcsec slit for various molecular emission fea- tures and normalized to the value for spectrum 66, the first spectrum obtained after the impact. Some of these measures include multiple lines in a dominant band, but for C2 and C3, we measured a bandhead. The error bars are the Poisson noise statistics and do not account for extinction uncertainties, diffi- culty removing the continuum, etc. The different molecular species reacted on different timescales. Note that we saw no increase in molecular emission in the first 10 minute spectrum after the impact so the value of 1 in this plot represents the ambient cometary emission and the increase came after at least 10 minutes post-impact.
from
Observations of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 with the Keck 1 HIRES Instrument During Deep Impact astro-ph