While dust emission from comets is driven by the sublimation of volatiles, it is not understood in detail how dust and volatiles are mixed in the surface and how the dust particles are connected to the gas stream. To get a better understanding of this coupling, we study how dust production is geographically distributed across the surface and how it varies with the diurnal cycle and seasons.
The Rosetta mission at comet 67P has yielded a large set of images showing individual dust grains as they fly across the field of view of the camera. We study the distribution of dust and its dynamical properties in such images and infer emission parameters such as velocity and size distribution from fitting a numerical simulation of the dust motion to the images. The result will help us to obtain a global picture of the amount of dust emitted to interplanetary space from comet 67P.
For comets that we can currently only observe with telescopes, we use a similar approach as for the active asteroids. We infer the velocities, production rates, size distribution and emission region of dust from numerical simulations of the dust motion under the influence of solar radiation pressure and gravity and comparison to telescope images of the dust tail evolution.