73p/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 - One Orbit after Break-Up: Search for Fragments

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 autores
6
Número de autores del IAC
0
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.