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Survey of the Plasma Environment of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Between August 6, 2014 and September 30, 2016, the Rosetta spacecraft orbited the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko with the purpose of observing the comet’s nucleus and the surrounding environment. The Rosetta spacecraft collected different types of data with a number of instruments, for example the Rosetta Plasma Consortium (RPC) instruments, that measured the plasma environment of the comet, and the ROSINA Comet Pressure Sensor (COPS), that measured the neutral gas environment. The aim of this study is to produce Python code to generate overview plots of data collected by the following RPC instruments: the Ion Composition Analyzer (ICA), the Ion and Electron Sensor (IES), the Fluxgate Magnetometer (MAG), the Mutual Impedance Probe (MIP), the Langmuir Probe (LAP), and the ROSINA-COPS instrument. The measurements taken by these instruments, describing the electrical, magnetic and physical properties of the plasma and gas in the cometary coma, have rarely before been visualized with uniform time axes in joint figures. A simultaneous representation of the data enables further analysis of the correlation of the instruments and of how the different plasma parameters interact in the comet’s environment. For all instruments, except ICA, the data was retrieved from ESA’s Planetary Science Archive (PSA). In the case of the ICA instrument, the data files were retrieved from IRF Kiruna’s database. The relevant data was identified and subsequently processed with various methods, such as summing over rows and columns, merging files and scaling parameters, and finally plotted in a common overview plot. The final result was a code that produces overview plots of measurements from the RPC instruments and the ROSINA-COPS instrument. With this code, overview plots of each day of the whole Rosetta mission could be generated. These overview plots are accessible through the Swedish Institute of Space Physics for future scientific use.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-532765
Date January 2024
CreatorsBlomquist, Cecilia, Hellgren, Stina, Holmén, Adéla, Lorin, Ebba
PublisherUppsala universitet, Institutionen för materialvetenskap
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
RelationMATVET-F

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