Return to Home Page
From: starrfie@hydro.la.asu.edu (Sumner Starrfield)
Subject: And now for something completely different- jupiter + comet
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 93 13:15:52 MST
Dear Colleagues:
The following is the combination of two messages submitted to
sci.astro by Ben Zellner of the Space Telescope Science Institute
concerning the impact of a Comet with Jupiter next summer. Since
most members of the "nova" list are interested in transient
phenomena, I thought that you might be interested in the event and
would like to plan observations as early as possible. I can think of
some things that I would like to try. I hope you don't mind some
solar system stuff - if so, I apologize in advance.
best regards
Sumner Starrfield
Now follows his messages:
The entire chain of nuclei will hit Jupiter over a span of several days,
and the outer dust "wings" will take weeks. As to the precision of time
estimates, the following is from notes that I took at the Division for
Planetary Sciences meeting a couple of weeks ago:
The central impact is now predicted for 1994 July 21.2 plus or minus 0.9
days. Ears pricked up when Don Yeomans told us how good the predictions
SHOULD become for the individual nuclei, with continuous good astrometry
starting next January. The following are for 3-sigma predictions:
at minus 2 months - 55 minutes
at minus 1 month - 40 minutes
at minus 1 week - 21 minutes
at minus 6 hours - 9 minutes
That is NOT good news for Galileo, which should be fed a hard observing
schedule at minus 2 weeks. Likewise for HST, but that may not be so
serious since we will mostly be limited to looking at aftermath-effects
anyway. Some people suggested that the astrometry could be improved by
long-focus images and setting up a network of better astrometric
standard stars.
Notes that I took
at the Boulder meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences on 18 October.
If I have mis-understood or mis-quoted anyone, it's mlimb as seen from Galileo and well-placed
on the dark side of a crescent Jupiter as seen from Voyager. The major
impacts from the nuclei will span 5.5 days in time, though the outer dust
"wings" will get thg, but
much further out than the existing ring, in the vicinity of Io. It will
come from dust particles that are braked and captured by the magnetosphere,
but on the average it will take several orbits to do that. Thus the ring
will take maybe 10
Return to the Powerful Daisaku
vsnet-adm@kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp
