Bibcode
Boehnhardt, Hermann; Holdstock, Stuart; Hainaut, Olivier; Tozzi, Gian Paolo; Benetti, Stefano; Licandro, Javier
Referencia bibliográfica
Earth, Moon, and Planets, v. 90, Issue 1, p. 131-139 (2002).
Fecha de publicación:
3
2002
Número de citas
18
Número de citas referidas
15
Descripción
We report on our search campaign for the fragments of the Jupiter family
comet and target of NASA's CONTOUR mission, Comet
3P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, one orbit revolution after the splitting of
its nucleus in 1995 (Boehnhardt et al., 1995). Fragment C was found back
with coma in November 1999 at 4 AU inbound and it continued to be active
during the perihelion arc until at least December 2001 when we observed
it last at 3.3 AU outbound. Fragment B was observed with coma between
July and September 2001 when moving outbound from 2.35 to 2.75 AU. The
search for other fragments including A, D (Boehnhardt et al., 1995) and
E (Kodata et al., 2000a, b; Nakamura et al., 2000) in a search area of
15 × 4 arcmin starting at fragment C along direction of the
extended radius vector was not successful in July and September 2001.
The limiting magnitude of this search of ~ 25 mag in R puts an upper
limit on the radius of potential fragments of about 200 m (assuming
albedo 0.04). The orbit deceleration parameter and the observed coma
brightness of component C suggest that this object is the primary
fragment that may contain a major part of the original nucleus.