Flying through cometary jets with the Rosetta spacecraft

Abstract: The Rosetta spacecraft orbited around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from 2014 to 2016. During this time, several thousands of cometary jets occurred and were photographed by the onboard cameras. Since the spacecraft slowly orbited around the comet nucleus and assuming an angular spread of 20º for the jets, it can be assumed that sometimes Rosetta flew through some of them. The dust particles ejected from the jet travel radially outward virtually unaffected by gravity, but as the jet is ongoing for several hours and as the comet nucleus rotates, the dust trace forms a spiral-like trajectory shape in space. Tracking the spacecraft's position around the times the jets were photographed, and checking whether it was within the dust cone, we found that Rosetta travelled across 181 out of the 3946 listed jets. Then, we looked into the plasma density and spacecraft potential data for every jet, finding some interesting events that could give rise to a further study into plasma interactions between jets and surrounding plasma in the cometary coma.