Deep Impact at ESO

... History of Comets - I

Introduction
The history of cometary astronomy is naturally divided into
five major periods, the transitions being marked by important
new insights. Before 1600, comets were essentially
considered to be heavenly omens and were not yet clearly
established as celestial (astronomical), rather than
meteorological phenomena in the terrestrial atmosphere. Then
followed two centuries of mostly positional measurements
with emphasis on the motions and the orbits, lasting until the
early 19th century, when the era of cometary physics was
inaugurated, in particular by the passage of P/Halley in 1835.
The next major step forward occurred in 1950 with the sudden
emergence of the modern picture of comets as being
essentially very old solar system objects made of primordial
ice and dust, generally in unstable orbits and intensively
interacting with the solar electromagnetic and corpuscular
radiation. Finally, the space missions to P/Giacobini-Zinner in
1985 and especially to P/Halley in 1986 provided the first in
situ observations of comets and dramatically widened our
scientific horizon, but also posed many new questions which
are yet to be answered.

Before 1950: The main events

The word comet, now used in all European languages, comes
from Greek (kometes= `the hairy one'), but the earliest extant
records of cometary observations date from around -1000 in
China and probably from about the same time in Chaldea (on
the territory of present-day Iraq). Ideas about the true nature
of comets are available from the time of the rise of Hellenistic
natural philosophy at about -550 when the Pythagoreans
considered comets to be a kind of (wandering) planets that
were seen rather infrequently and mostly near the horizon in
the morning or evening sky. Aristotle in his Meteorology (ca.
-330) relegated comets to the lowest, `sublunar' sphere in his
system of spherical shells and described them as `dry and
warm exhalations' in the upper atmosphere. There is no

mention of comets in Ptolemy's Almagest, presumably

because they were not considered of celestial origin, but he
described them in astrological terms in his Tetrabiblos. The
Aristotelean view on comets was dogmatically upheld during
the following millennium; the first doubts seem to have been
expressed by Thomas Aquinas and also by Roger Bacon in his
Opus Tertium from 1267, but like their predecessors they
strongly believed comets to be evil omens.
Finally, Paolo Toscanelli observed P/Halley in 1456 and
several other comets between 1433 and 1472 with improved
accuracy, inaugurating the renaissance of European
observational astronomy after the long period of dormancy.
The decisive demonstration was delivered by Tycho Brahe
(and confirmed by a few other observers, especially Michael
Mstlin), on the basis of extensive observations of the bright
comet which first appeared in late 1577. He showed that the
horizontal parallax of this comet was certainly smaller than 15
arcmin, corresponding to a distance in excess of 230 Earth
radii, or four times the distance to the Moon. The question of
how comets move arose as a natural consequence and in
1610, the amateur Sir William Lower proposed that they do so
in very elongated ellipses, while Robert Hooke and Giovanni
Borelli suggested that cometary orbits may be parabolic.
Georg Drffel was the first to specifically state that the two
bright comets seen in 1680 and 1681 are one and the same
before and after its perihelion passage, and that it moved
along a parabola with the Sun in the focal point. Isaac Newton
in Principia (1687), applied his new theory of gravitation to
show that the 1680 comet moved in an elliptical, albeit very
nearly parabolic orbit and that it passed only about 0.0016 AU
above the surface of the Sun. Edmond Halley (1705)
computed the orbits of a dozen well-observed comets and
demonstrated the periodical nature of the bright comet of
1682. `Halley's Comet', as it was from now on called, was
telescopically recovered in December 1758 by Johann
Palitzsch; this proved conclusively the validity of Newton's
law of gravity out to the distance of the aphelion at 35 AU,
more than three times the distance of Saturn, the outermost
planet known at that time.
18th century cometary astronomy is characterized by the
gradual development of improved methods for orbital
computations and at the beginning of the 19th century, this
had become a straightforward, if still somewhat arduous task,

in particular when planetary perturbations were taken into

account by means of iterative corrections. Some basic features
of the orbital distribution of comets were established, e.g. the
extremely broad range of orbital periods, over which the
different objects are scattered. While some comets turned out
to have orbits virtually indistinguishable from parabolas,
others were confined to the inner solar system in the vicinity
of Jupiter's orbit or inside of it. As time passed, a
concentration of comets moving in similar orbits with fairly
low inclinations and with aphelia close to Jupiter's orbit
became more and more obvious; this concentration became
known as the Jupiter family. It either called for a continuing
ejection from Jupiter or for a mechanism of dynamical
evolution, called `capture', whereby the comets would become
concentrated into such orbits. It was realized that comets in
general, and Jupiter family members in particular, suffer by
far the largest orbital perturbations due to the action by
Jupiter, and the restricted three-body problem (Sun-Jupitercomet) therefore offered an interesting approximation for the
study of their dynamical behaviour.
After Halley, Johann F. Encke was the second to successfully
predict the return of a comet (in 1822) which as a
consequence now carries his name. It turned out to have, and
still has, the shortest period of all known comets, 3.3 years,
and it was soon found to arrive systematically about 0.1 days
earlier at perihelion than predicted, even when taking all
planetary perturbations into account. Inspired by his
observations of an asymmetric distribution of luminous matter
in the head of P/Halley in 1835, Friedrich W. Bessel
interpreted this as a Sun-oriented asymmetric outflow and
suggested that a non-gravitational effect might arise due to
the rocket-type impulse imparted by such an outflow. As a
consequence, such perihelion shifts as observed for P/Encke
might arise.
During the next decades, progressively more sophisticated
instrumentation became available and the road was opened for
a more physical approach to the study of comets. Comet tails
were explained by Heinrich W.M. Olbers (1812) and Bessel
(1836) by assuming that they were made of solid particles on
which was acting a repulsive force directed anti-sunward. The
close connection between comets and meteors was
demonstrated by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1866, 1867) who
found that the orbits of the Perseid and the Leonid meteor

streams coincide with those of comets P/Swift-Tuttle (1862

III) and P/Tempel-Tuttle (1866 I), respectively. In 1835,
P/Halley became the first comet in which detailed structures
were extensively observed, in particular by John Herschel,
Bessel and Friedrich G.W. Struve, who described jets, cones
and streamers, cf. the Atlas by Donn et al. (1986). This led
Bessel (1836) to postulate the ejection of material in the
direction of the Sun which was then somehow forced back in
the opposite direction by an unknown repulsive force. Feodor
A. Bredikhin (quoted by Jaegermann, 1903) further developed
this interpretation into the Bessel-Bredikhin' mechanical
model which remained in use until the late 1950's. Sir Arthur
Eddington (1910), introduced the fountain model of particle
ejection in which the parabolas represent the outer envelopes
of particle trajectories emitted from the sunlit hemisphere of
the nucleus or surfaces of high density of matter. One of the
repulsive forces acting on the dust was identified by Svante
Arrhenius (1900) as the radiation pressure by sunlight. The
corresponding theory was further developed by Karl
Schwarzschild (1901) and extended to molecules by Peter
Debye (1909).
The first spectroscopic observations of comets were made by
Giovanni Donati (1864) and by Sir William Huggins (1868)
who visually compared the spectrum of comet Winnecke
(1868 II) with flame spectra and found that the bands seen in
the comet and in the flame, now known as the `carbon' or
`Swan bands', were similar. Subsequent observations showed
that these bands were present in all comet spectra and that
carbon was therefore an important constituent of comets.
Spectroscopy soon became the standard technique for
studying the light of comets and new emissions were
discovered at an increasing rate; Baldet (1926) published a
detailed description of the spectra of about 40 comets,
obtained since 1864, together with a complete bibliography of
all comets observed until that time by spectroscopy.
Schwarzschild and Kron (1911) studied the intensity
distribution in P/Halley's straight tail during the 1910 passage
and suggested that the emission could be explained by the
effect of absorption of solar light, followed by re-emission,
i.e. fluorescence. Polydor Swings (1941) solved the longstanding problem of why the violet CN bands (3875 A) in
cometary spectra did not resemble CN laboratory spectra and
varied in appearance: because of the crowding of absorption
lines in the solar spectrum, the intensity at the exciting

wavelengths critically depends on the doppler shift caused by

the comet's motion relative to the Sun and so determines the
strength of the fluorescence emission lines in the comet's
spectrum; this is now known as the Swings effect.

1950 - 1951: Two crucial years

A major revolution in cometary science took place in 195051, with the formulation within a short time span of three
fundamental ideas: 1) the icy conglomerate (`dirty snowball')
model of the cometary nucleus by Fred Whipple (1950), 2)
the identification from kinematic studies of the existence of a
distant reservoir of comets, now known as the Oort cloud, by
Jan Hendrik Oort (1950), and 3) the explanation of the
motions in cometary plasma tails as due to interaction with
the solar wind by Ludwig Biermann (1951). Interestingly,
none of these ideas resulted directly from new observational
evidence, and important parts of them had been proposed
earlier, but it was the first time that the known facts were
effectively combined to reveal the new picture.
The icy conglomerate nucleus
Karl Wurm, in a series of enlightening papers published
between 1932 and 1939, suggested that, because the observed
cometary radicals and ions are not chemically stable, these
species must be created by pure photochemistry of more
stable molecules residing inside the nucleus, cf. for instance
the reviews by Wurm (1943) and Swings (1943). In the
1940's, Swings contributed significantly to the development
of ideas along Wurm's line of thinking and his key role
appears to have been overlooked in the later literature. The
presence of CO, C2N2, CH4, CO2, N2 and NH3 was invoked on
the basis that CO+, CN, CH, CO2+, N2+ and NH were identified
in comet spectra, respectively. Swings proposed many
possible and reasonable candidates as parent molecules,
among others CH4 since CH2 was held responsible for the
emission recorded in the 4000-4100 A interval, as well as
H2O, following the discovery of the OH 3090 A ultraviolet
emission in 1941 by Swings, and despite the fact that the low
vapor pressure of water was considered a serious problem
when explaining the observed presence of the OH emission
far from the Sun. In 1948, he came very close to actually
proposing an icy model for the nucleus by suggesting that the
mentioned molecules could exist in the solid state in the

nucleus.
Swings (1942) also suggested that molecules similar to those
found in meteorites were possibly stored in the nucleus by
occlusion. This idea was quantitatively (and most probably,
independently) explored by Boris Yu. Levin (1943), who
developed the desorption theory of outgassing from the
surface of meteoritic material to demonstrate that his sand
bank model for the nucleus had a solid basis. However,
although the average desorption heat, about 6000 cal/mole, as
deduced empirically from the observed
brightness/heliocentric distance relation, was in agreement
with the laboratory values for the cometary molecules
mentioned above, the amount of material that could be
desorbed from a sand bank with an expected cometary mass
fell far short of explaining the persistence of comae over
several months at single passages, or indeed, the survival of
comets like P/Halley or P/Encke for many apparitions.
Since the mid-19th century, a great deal of research had
concentrated on understanding the nature of the central source
of gas and dust in comets. Transits of comets across the solar
disk had never shown any dark silhouette, proving the
absence of any extended, optically thick object. Seeinglimited observations of comets passing near the Earth showed
a central, unresolved light source of dimensional upper limits
in the 10-100 km range (Nicolaus B. Richter, 1963). Upper
limits to cometary masses had been estimated for instance
from the absence of evidence for mutual gravitational
attraction of the components of P/Biela in 1846 or of any
influence on the Earth's orbit at very close passages like that
of P/Lexell in 1770; in the end, masses in the 1012 - 1017 kg
range were estimated (Whipple 1961). Comets were
obviously small and light bodies, possibly even without a
solid nucleus at the center. At the end of the 1940's, the nature
of the nucleus was still a subject of much speculation and no
consensus had been reached. In an attempt to put together all
known facts about the cometary nucleus, and with particular
attention to the long-standing problem of explaining the nongravitational perihelion shifts, Whipple (1950, 1951) laid the
foundations for the model of an icy conglomerate, solid
nucleus. Building on the idea dating back to Pierre S. de
Laplace (1813) and Bessel (1836), Whipple described the
nucleus as a mixture of ices from which the gases in the coma
are produced by sublimation in increasing quantities as the

comet approaches the Sun and the nucleus surface

temperature rises, and meteoritic dust that is released from the
nucleus when these ices evaporate. This model had the virtue
of explaining at once several observed features: 1) the large
gas production rates, for which the desorption model was
totally inadequate, 2) the observed jet-like structures in the
coma and the erratic activity, impossible to produce if the
nucleus were a cloud of particles, 3) the observed nongravitational forces by means of momentum transfer by the
outflow of gas from the nucleus, the net effect on the orbital
motion being dependent, among others, on the sense of the
nuclear spin and the direction of the spin axis, 4) the fact that
most comets which pass extremely close to the Sun, e.g. the
Kreutz sungrazing group, apparently may survive such
approaches intact and with little change after perihelion, and
5) the fact that comets are the sources of meteor streams.
Items 2-4 gave particularly strong arguments for a solid
nucleus rather than a sand bank structure.
The Whipple model quickly won general acceptance and was
gradually refined during the following decades. It had,
however, some shortcomings; the main one was pinpointed by
Whipple himself as being the large difference between the
latent heats of vaporization of the various ices. As a
consequence the highly volatile material should be rapidly
removed from the surface layer of the nucleus long before
perihelion, in contradiction to the observation of radicals and
ions like CH and CH+ near the Sun. This objection was
tentatively removed when Armand Delsemme and Swings
(1952) noticed that almost all parent molecules (except NH3)
required to explain the observed radicals and ions in comets
could co-exist in the nucleus in the form of solid clathrate
hydrates. In this way, the highly volatile material does not
disappear too rapidly and is also freed together with less
volatile molecules; this explains why the spectrum remains
more or less similar throughout the comet apparition.
The Oort Cloud
Many orbital studies of individual comets with particular
attention to the influence of planetary perturbations were
carried out at several observatories during the first decades of
the 20th century. They were naturally followed by statistical
considerations about the distribution and dynamical origin of
comets, including the question of whether or not some comets

have `original' hyperbolic orbits (reciprocal semi-major axis

1/aorig < 0) and are therefore of interstellar origin. The work at
the Copenhagen Observatory by Elis Strmgren (beginning in
about 1910) and his associates is typical of such studies and
showed the absence of originally hyperbolic orbits, all
observed orbits of this type having been caused by planetary
perturbations. Sinding (1948) produced a list with the values
of 1/aorig for 21 long-period comets which together with the
work by van Woerkom (1948) formed the basis for Oort's
famous paper (1950) on the existence of a cometary reservoir
in the outer reaches of the solar system. The idea of a cloud of
distant hypothetical comets, stable against stellar
perturbations, and its necessity in case many observed comets
would have 1/aorig 10000 AU, had been expressed earlier by
Ernst J. pik (1932).
Based on van Woerkom's (1948) theory of the orbital
diffusion caused by planetary perturbations, Oort found that
the number of comets with very small values of 1/aorig is much
larger than one would expect, when comparing with the
neighbouring, long-period elliptical orbits. This suggested that
many of the comets become unobservable after their first
passage through the inner solar system. In a subsequent study,
Oort and Schmidt (1951) distinguished between `new comets'
(those coming directly from the Oort cloud, making their first
visit near the Sun) and `old comets' (those returning on elliptic
orbits). The former appeared to be dustier and brighten more
slowly than the latter. These tentative conclusions have later
been revisited and modified, and the role of stellar
perturbations in providing new comets has been reconsidered.
However, the basic concept of the Oort cloud as an outer halo
of the solar system has been substantiated by later studies,
based on improved samples of cometary orbits.
The solar wind
The tails of comets have been the objects of many
investigations. It is exactly these appendices that make comets
so impressive to the layman, and astronomers of all times
have been struck by the fact that the tails may vary so
dramatically from one object to another. In the early 20th
century, perhaps the strangest characteristic was the enormous
repulsive force found to act on straight comet tails in the antisolar direction.

Already in 1859, Richard Carrington (1859) suspected a

physical connection between the major solar flare observed in
the morning of Sept. 1, and enhanced magnetic activity on the
Earth some hours thereafter. Ideas about the possible
existence of a stream of particles from the Sun, perhaps
electrically charged, emerged towards the end of the 19th
century, in particular to explain the excitation of molecules
and ions observed in cometary comae. It was also found that
cometary ion tails (formerly Type I) develop closer to the Sun
than dust tails (formerly Type II). However, it was only 50
years later that Cuno Hoffmeister (1943) provided the crucial
observations of a gas tail aberration of about 6o, i.e. the angle
between the observed tail and the anti-solar direction. This
was correctly interpreted by Biermann (1951) in terms of
interaction between the cometary ions in the tail and the solar
wind, a stream of electrically charged particles from the Sun
with velocities of several hundred km/sec. His derived plasma
densities were unrealistically high, since electrons were
thought to accelerate the cometary ions, but Hannes Alfven
(1957) settled this problem by introducing the notion of an
interplanetary magnetic field which is carried along with the
solar wind. Its existence was soon thereafter confirmed by
experiments onboard some of the first spacecraft launched
after the space age opened in late 1957 (Lunik I and II,
Explorer X, Mariner II, etc.). Still, for quite some time,
cometary ion tails were the only well-distributed solar wind
probes in interplanetary space and they remain so outside the
ecliptic. Another important result of Alfven's study is that an
ion tail must be considered as part of the comet since it is
magnetically connected to the cometary head.

Deep Impact at ESO

... History of Comets - II
Introduction
The history of cometary astronomy is naturally divided into
five major periods, the transitions being marked by important
new insights. Before 1600, comets were essentially
considered to be heavenly omens and were not yet clearly
established as celestial (astronomical), rather than
meteorological phenomena in the terrestrial atmosphere. Then
followed two centuries of mostly positional measurements
with emphasis on the motions and the orbits, lasting until the
early 19th century, when the era of cometary physics was
inaugurated, in particular by the passage of P/Halley in 1835.
The next major step forward occurred in 1950 with the
sudden emergence of the modern picture of comets as being
essentially very old solar system objects made of primordial
ice and dust, generally in unstable orbits and intensively
interacting with the solar electromagnetic and corpuscular
radiation. Finally, the space missions to P/Giacobini-Zinner in
1985 and especially to P/Halley in 1986 provided the first in
situ observations of comets and dramatically widened our
scientific horizon, but also posed many new questions which
are yet to be answered.

1952 - 1984: The modern era

Following the break-throughs in 1950-51, the entire concept
about comets had to be revised. This process was a gradual
one, as new observational facts were collected, and also
because these observations were becoming increasingly
quantitative, allowing a progressively more detailed
verification of the new ideas. Although number density
estimates for cometary comae had been derived since the time
of Wurm's investigations in the 1930's, the figures obtained
were rather uncertain and their reliability was limited by the
lack of quantitative studies about the excitation mechanisms
of the light. Thus it is not too surprising that, continuing the
earlier investigations by Swings and McKellar, most
spectroscopic studies between 1950 and 1970 were devoted

to a never-ending attempt at discovering and identifying new

emission lines and bands, as well as at unraveling the
structure of the rotational and vibrational bands of the comet
radicals and ions. A special reference must here be made to
the numerous and important contributions from the Liege
school, reviews of which are given by Swings (1956) and
Arpigny (1965). During this epoch rather complete models
were made of the fluorescence of the CN, CH, OH, and C2
radicals. The advent of high resolution spectroscopy in the
late 1950's allowed the identification of many unknown lines,
most of which were due to C2 and NH2. It is worth
mentioning here that this effort has never been carried
through to completion and many observed cometary spectral
lines have still not been assigned an emitter; the most likely
are CO+, CO2+ and C3 in the near-UV, C2 and NH2 in the
optical and NH2 and H2O+ in the IR.
The following Sections, divided according to the main areas
of investigative thrust during this period, illustrate how
cometary research over the most recent decades has
vindicated the ideas put forward in 1950-51. The ultraviolet,
infrared and radio windows were explored in the early 1970's,
the emissions of H I, O I and OH were observed and the
dissociation products of the main volatile constituent of the
nucleus were finally detected observationally. The first radar
detection of a comet in 1980 (P/Encke, Kamoun et al. 1982),
and the first recording of an image of a comet nucleus in
1986 convinced the last sceptics that Whipple was correct.
From refined studies of the orbital motion of comets it was
demonstrated that Oort's distant reservoir was fully justified,
even though some shortcomings of the theory are only now
being overcome and have led to new and exciting
developments. Above all, however, a wealth of quantitative
data became available, making truly comparative studies of
comets possible. In a not too distant future this should enable
us to learn whether the differences we observe between
individual comets are the results of evolutionary processes or
rather reflect intrinsic diversity.
Water as the main constituent of comets
In 1958, high resolution spectroscopy allowed the separation
of the terrestrial oxygen lines from the cometary ones and
also led to the definitive confirmation of the presence of the
isotopic lines of 13C, long suspected to be present in comets.

The detection of the [O I] red lines in comet Mrkos (1957 V)

(Swings and Greenstein 1958) created a completely new
problem: it was soon shown by Wurm (1963) that if
fluorescence is at the origin of the emission, then very large
amounts of oxygen are implied, much larger than those of for
instance C2. It seemed preferable to assume another emission
mechanism and Wurm proposed corpuscular excitation. The
idea that some coma species may be produced directly into an
excited state can be traced back to McKellar (1943), but this
suggestion was not explored in detail until 1964 (Biermann
and Trefftz 1964). Their work led to the prediction that
photodissociation of parent molecules is the main production
mechanism and that not only oxygen but also hydrogen atoms
must exist in large amounts in comets, with resulting
production rates of e.g. log Q (mol s-1) ~ 30 for a bright
comet, or much larger than those of the parents of CO+, CN or
C2. In some sense, the discovery in 1970 by the Orbiting
Astronomical Observatory (OAO-2) and the Orbiting
Geophysical Observatory (OGO-5) of huge Lyman-alpha
haloes of neutral hydrogen (> 1.5 x 107 km) around comets
Tago-Sato-Kosaka (1969 IX) and Bennett (1970 II) did not
come as a complete surprise. However, the origin of these
hydrogen atoms was not yet known with certainty.
While the OH emission band at 3090 AA was first identified
in comet Cunningham (1941 I) by Swings, the first
quantitative OH abundance measurements only date from the
early 1970's (Code et al. 1972; Blamont and Festou 1974;
Keller and Lillie 1974). The analysis of the Lyman-alpha
isophotes of comet Bennett (1970 II) revealed that the
velocity of the H-atoms was about 8 km s-1 (Bertaux et al.
1973). Following an investigation of the photolysis of water
molecules by sunlight, this led these authors to speculate
about the possibility that the majority of the observed Hatoms were coming from the dissociation of OH radicals. To
prove this assertion, Blamont and Festou (1974) measured
both the then unknown scalelength of OH and the production
rate of that radical in comet Kohoutek (1973 XII). They
proposed for the first time, on a quantitative basis, that water
was the parent of most of the hydrogen atoms and the OH
radicals. Horst Uwe Keller and co-workers reached similar
conclusions in a series of independent papers: Keller (1971)
discussed the possibility that the observed H-atoms in comet
Bennett might arise from the direct dissociation of water and
later (Keller 1973a, 1973b) developed these ideas further. His

investigation though, as well as that of Bertaux et al. (1973),

was limited by the fact that the parameters governing the
water photolysis were not well known at that time. Keller and
Lillie (1974) also measured the scalelength of OH (in comet
Bennett) and found a value in complete agreement with that
found for comet Kohoutek. The definitive clue that H2O was
the main source of both the H-atoms and the OH radicals
came when the velocity of the H-atoms was measured
directly from COPERNICUS observations (Drake et al. 1976)
and, indirectly, from the analysis of H I Lyman-alpha
observations (cf. the review by Keller 1976), and was found
to be compatible with the water photolysis scheme. This was
confirmed by the direct observation of water in P/Halley in
1986.
After the discovery of the 18 cm maser emission of OH
(Biraud et al. 1974; Turner 1974), OH radio observations
became routine and the evidence for the ubiquitous presence
of water in comets was overwhelming. The emission of an
unknown ion was observed in comet Kohoutek (1973 XII) by
Herbig (1973) and Benvenuti and Wurm (1974). Herzberg
and Lew (1974) had just obtained the first laboratory spectra
of the H2O+ ion and tentatively identified this ion as the
source of the new cometary emission. The same emission was
later found in cometary spectra recorded as early as 1942
(Swings et al. 1943). Although the water ion might be an
abundant species in comet tails, its presence there is not
conspicuous: this is a clear indication that the ion is lost
rapidly, unlike the other tail ions. Aikin (1974) showed that
the main loss mechanism is a charge exchange reaction with
water molecules leading to the formation of the H3O+ ion, and
this latter is likely to be destroyed in electron recombination
reactions. H3O+ was indeed found to be one of the main ions
in the comae of P/Giacobini-Zinner and P/Halley.
Quantitative studies and comparative cometology
Many parameters for the OH radical were derived from radio
observations at 18 cm. The detailed mechanism by which
comets emit photons at that wavelength was investigated by
Despois et al. (1981). The methodology for determining OH
velocity profiles was worked out by Bockeee-Morvan and
Gerard (1984). An overview of the production rate and
velocity determinations is given by Bockelee-Morvan et al.
(1990). Beginning with comet Bradfield (1979 X), a long

series of high quality observations of the UV spectrum of

comets was obtained by the International Ultraviolet
Explorer (IUE), from which a self-consistent set of water
production rates was derived (e.g. Festou and Feldman 1987).
The radio and UV determinations of these rates do not agree
perfectly, because the models used in the interpretation of the
data differ markedly. Schloerb (1988) and Gerard (1990) have
discussed this problem.
The 1970's saw the development of quantitative observations
of comet emissions, mainly by means of narrow-band
photoelectric filter photometry through diaphragms
encompassing a more or less large part of the coma. A review
of the early observations and the observing techniques is
given by A'Hearn (1983). One of the shortcomings of
standard photoelectric photometry is the contamination by an
underlying continuum and by gaseous emissions in the wings
of the spectral transmission curve defined by the filter. It was
therefore not surprizing that spectrophotometry developed
rapidly in the early 1980's when linear detectors and image
intensifier tubes became available; see the review by A'Hearn
(1982). This method provided both a good separation of the
band or line emissions and also spatially well-resolved
information about the distribution of coma species. In
parallel, numerous theoretical studies, aimed at calculating
the fluorescence efficiencies of the coma radicals and ions,
resulted in the establishment of reliable conversions of
observed surface brightness into column densities of the
different species. The last step in the data analysis process is
then the derivation of gas production rates.
The data accumulated during the last 20 years or so by many
dedicated observers, using both ground- and space-based
instruments, have made possible the comparison of the
relative abundances in comae of different comets. As direct
sources of detailed information and for additional references
on this subject as well as the radio OH measurements quoted
above, we refer the reader in particular to the papers by
A'Hearn and Millis (1980), Cochran (1987), Newburn and
Spinrad (1989) and Osip et al. (1992). A list of all individual
observations made with the IUE until late 1989 and a
discussion of the resulting comparative cometology have
been published by Festou (1990). The most striking
observational fact is that, at first sight, all comets look alike
(Cochran 1989). There are just a few well-known objects for

which the chemical composition of the coma departs notably

from that of an average comet, e.g. a few CO+ rich comets or
those that seem to contain only one or a few of the actual
compounds of comet comae. For instance, P/GiacobiniZinner is C2 and C3 depleted (Cochran 1989), while comet
Yanaka (1988 XXIV) seems to be made almost exclusively of
NH2 and water (Fink 1992). As suggested by the direct
inspection of optical (Swings 1948) and UV spectra (Festou
1990b), the main difference between individual comets is the
continuum to gas emission ratio. Observations of P/Halley in
1986 added an interesting piece to the puzzle: CO and some
other observed gases require an extended source in the coma.
A key issue is now to determine the relationship between this
source and the dust particles. The general picture beginning
to emerge is that all comets basically have similar molecular
abundances and that the observed differences might only
reflect a variable dust to gas production ratio. It remains to be
determined whether this ratio is an intrinsic property or the
result of an evolutionary (i.e. ageing) process.
Dynamical evolution
From the point of view of cometary dynamics, the modern era
is first of all distinguished by the advent and development of
efficient and powerful computers. This allowed, for the first
time, extensive numerical simulations of the orbital evolution
resulting from repeated close encounters with Jupiter and
other planets. It also revolutionized the work on orbit
determination and linkage of past apparitions for observed
comets as well as the preparation of ephemerides for
upcoming apparitions, even for long-lost comets.
Whereas Oort had been working on a small sample of comets
to build his theory, Marsden et al. (1978) improved the earlier
statistics by using 200 well-determined long-period orbits.
They found a concentration of inverse semimajor axes
corresponding to an average aphelion distance of about
45,000 AU, only about half as remote as Oort's original
distance. A major problem remained the apparent
overabundance of Jupiter family comets. Edgar Everhart
(1972) found a possible route of direct transfer from the Oort
cloud via Jovian perturbations at repeated encounters with the
planet, beginning with a special type of initial orbits with
perihelia near Jupiter's orbit and low inclinations. However,
some authors questioned the efficiency of this transfer or the

fit of the orbital distribution of the captured comets. An

alternative scenario came from orbital integrations of the
observed comets by Elena I. Kazimirchak-Polonskaya (1972):
the comets might not be captured by Jupiter alone, but rather
by a stepwise process involving all the giant planets.
The ideas about the long-term dynamics of the Oort cloud
evolved considerably. While passages of individual stars were
mostly considered in earlier investigations, the tidal effects of
the Galaxy as a whole, preliminarily modelled by Chebotarev
(1965), have become recognized in recent years as the prime
mechanism to provide new comets from the outer cloud. The
dramatic effects that might follow upon close encounters with
massive perturbers, such as giant molecular clouds (Biermann
and Luest 1978), also received a great deal of attention. In
particular, the question of the stability of the outer, classical
regions of the Oort cloud over the age of the solar system has
been debated.
A major step forward taken during this period dealt with the
modelling of nongravitational effects in cometary motions.
Based on Whipple's concepts, Brian Marsden (1969)
introduced a nongravitational force into the Newtonian
equations of motion with simple expressions for the radial
and transverse components in the orbital plane. These
involved a function of the heliocentric distance r expressing a
standard `force law', multiplied by a coefficient whose value
was determined along with the osculating orbital elements by
minimizing the residuals of the fit to positional observations.
The radial coefficient was called A1 and the transverse A2. It
was realized that the model might not be physically realistic
and that more meaningful parameters might be derived from a
generalized formalism, but attempts in this direction were not
successful (Marsden 1970). The final update of the model
was made in 1973 (Marsden et al. 1973), stimulated by
calculations of the H2O sublimation rate as a function of r
(Delsemme and Miller 1971). This was taken as the model
force law, expressed as an algebraic function g(r) whose
parameters were chosen to fit Delsemme and Miller's results.
Eventually more realistic models were constructed for the jet
force as resulting from asymmetric H2O outgassing, including
the heat flow in the surface layers of the nucleus (Rickman
and Froeschle 1983). As a result it was found that the true
force law might be very different from the g(r) formula, and

hence there should be room for an improved model.

The long-term variations of the nongravitational forces were
found to involve a wide range of behaviour. Thus the welldetermined A2-values found over different periods of time for
the same comet usually vary in a more or less regular fashion,
often including changes of sign. This was generally
interpreted in terms of spin axis precession, which in turn
may be caused by the torque associated with the jet force of
outgassing. An early suggestion of such a scenario was made
for P/Kopff (Yeomans 1974). Quantitative models were first
derived by Whipple and Zdenek Sekanina (1979) to fit the
secular decrease of the nongravitational perihelion shift of
P/Encke. These models, and similar ones developed later on
for a number of other comets (Sekanina 1984-85; Sekanina
and Yeomans 1985), led to predictions of some physical
parameters of the nuclei - in particular, the orientations of the
spin axes. They treated the jet force in a physically more
realistic way than the g(r) formula. However, the results were
still dependent on model assumptions and thus questionable
(cf. Sekanina 1988).
Cometary origin
The introduction of the basic concepts of the Oort cloud and
the icy conglomerate nucleus have naturally influenced
modern ideas about the origin of comets. Oort (1950) already
paid attention to the problem of formation of the cloud and
hypothesized that it could have originated as a result of
Jovian perturbations after the explosion of a planet-sized
body in the asteroid belt. Thereby the asteroids and comets
would have a common origin, the former being devolatilized
variants of the latter. However, this revival of Olbers' old idea
did not gain wide acceptance, partly due to the growing
evidence that meteorites, obviously part of the same complex
of minor bodies, have nearly solar elemental abundances and
can not originate from a planet-sized parent body.
Around 1950, the Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis for the
origin of the solar system was also reconsidered in the light of
the chemical compositions of the planets and their variation
with heliocentric distance. Edgeworth (1949) and Gerald P.
Kuiper (1949, 1951) argued that it is unlikely for the solar
nebula to have ended abruptly at the position of Neptune's
orbit, and thus a large population of planet precursors with a

generally icy composition would have existed outside the

giant planets. Kuiper (1951) claimed that such bodies could
be identified with Whipple's cometary nuclei and suggested
that Pluto's gravitational action (its mass was then thought to
be in the 0.1 - 1 Earth-mass range) might have scattered the
objects into Neptune's zone of influence, whereupon ejection
into the Oort cloud would ensue. In particular, outside Pluto's
orbit, the population might still remain intact.
During the following decades, Lyttleton (1952, 1974)
challenged both basic concepts (the solid nucleus and the
Oort cloud), arguing instead for cometary formation by
aggregation of dust during the Sun's passages through
interstellar clouds. Cometary origin thus would not be
coupled to the origin of the solar system but to capture events
throughout its lifetime. This scenario never received as much
support as the one due to Kuiper, since it faced obvious
difficulties, e.g. in explaining the cometary 1/aorig distribution
and nongravitational effects. As both Oort's and Whipple's
concepts have been consolidated in recent years, the basis for
Lyttleton's picture has now virtually disappeared.
However, the idea of interstellar comets embraces many
different scenarios that are subject to continued
investigations. Aspects that have attracted particular attention
are the distribution of aphelion directions of long-period
comets and the possible signature of the solar apex, the
mechanisms for formation of cometary nuclei under
interstellar cloud conditions, the role of comets in galactic
chemical evolution, and the significance of the fact that no
hyperbolic comets have as yet been observed.
The standard concept of the solar nebula was criticized by
Alfven and Arrhenius (1970, 1976), who argued for the
importance of electromagnetic forces in the collapsing cloud,
leading to a different picture of the radial arrangement of
orbiting material and a different scenario for the accretion of
larger bodies. In particular, the formation of comets was
considered to occur by longitudinal focussing produced by
self-gravitation and inelastic collisions in narrow streams of
particles, so-called jet streams. This idea has not gained
general acceptance, however. An eruptive origin of comets
continued to attract attention as well. Van Flandern (1977,
1978) proposed, based on the distribution of orbits of longperiod comets, that comets and asteroids originate from the

break-up of a 90 Earth-mass planet in the asteroid belt only

5.5 x 106 years ago. This suggestion did not gain support,
mainly on physical grounds (see the discussion following Van
Flandern 1977). It was in stark disagreement with the picture
building up during the 1970's and 80's, according to which
minor bodies in general, and comets in particular, represent
undifferentiated, pristine solar system material (Delsemme
1977). Sergej K. Vsekhsvyatskij (1972, 1977) continued to
favour a variant of the Lagrange ejection hypothesis,
involving the satellites of the giant planets, but he remained
quite isolated in a community dominated by the view of
comets as primordial bodies probing the solar nebula. The
idea is fraught with many problems of different nature - let us
mention here only that of explaining the abundance of longperiod comets.

1985 - 1986: Encounters with P/Giacobini-Zinner

and P/Halley
Following the enormous increase of interest for comets in the
late 1970's, another giant leap in our understanding of comet
phenomena occurred in March 1986 when six spacecraft
(henceforth `S/C') observed P/Halley in situ, and future
cometary scientists will undoubtedly speak about the preand post-Halley eras, much as historians describe the
transition from the dark ages to the renaissance period.
However, the first cometary encounter took place already six
months earlier on September 11, 1985, when the ISEE-3
spacecraft, released from its earlier task of monitoring the
Earth's radiation belts and, renamed as the International
Cometary Explorer (ICE), passed through the tail of
P/Giacobini-Zinner, about 8000 km from the nucleus. The
main results were the confirmation of the plasma tail model,
indications about the ion composition and the detection of a
neutral current sheet at the center of the tail. ICE flew on to
register the effects of P/Halley on the interplanetary medium
from a distance of 28 x 106 km sunward.
The detailed results from the extraordinary P/Halley
campaign during the 1985-86 apparition fill many volumes it will here suffice to give a very condensed overview of the
main results.
Five spacecraft encountered P/Halley in early 1986: Vega 1
(closest approach on March 6 at 8890 km distance), Suisei

(March 8; 150,000 km); Vega 2 (March 9; 8030 km),

Sakigake (March 11; 7 x 106 km) and Giotto (March 14; 600
km). At the same time, an unequalled long-term Earth-based
observational effort was coordinated by the International
Halley Watch (IHW) (Newburn and Rahe 1990); the IHW
Archive with more than 25 Gbytes of data was released in
December 1992 (IHW 1992) and the associated Summary
Volume (Sekanina and Fry 1991) contains detailed
information about the data obtained within the various IHW
Networks. The observations were carried out in all
wavebands from the UV at 120 nm to the radioband at 18 cm,
by professionals and amateurs. It has proven particularly
fruitful to combine space- and Earth-based observations for
calibration and long-term monitoring purposes. In general,
the earlier developed cometary models were confirmed and
could now be quantified by in situ measurements, leading to
many new insights.
The nucleus was observed at close distance for the first time;
it was found to be larger (equivalent radius about 5.5 km) and
darker (albedo about 4 percent) than expected. Surface
features (craters, ridges, mountains etc.) and the emitting
vents were observed. The coma was found to be highly
structured on all scales (jets, shells, ion streamers, etc.) and
the gaseous component (parent molecules, radicals, ions and
atomic species) was analyzed in situ; H2O was confirmed to
be by far (about 85 percent by weight) the most abundant
constituent in the gas phase. A cavity devoid of magnetic field
was detected within about 5,000 km of the nucleus. The dust
was analyzed by size and composition; there was an
unexpectedly high fraction of very small grains, down to the
sensitivity limit (about 10-19 kg). In addition to those of
possibly chondritic composition, carbonaceous `CHON'
particles were seen for the first time; they may be a new
source of gas. Atomic masses from 1 to 100 amu. were
detected by mass spectroscopy, and the likely presence of
large organic polymeric molecules was indicated. The
maximum measured production rates were larger than 104 and
about 3 x 104 kg/sec for dust and gas, respectively, i.e. a
dust/gas ratio larger than 0.3. The integrated mass loss
experienced by the nucleus at this passage, of the order of
about 4 x 1011 kg (but very uncertain) was about 0.5 percent
of the total mass of the nucleus, estimated at 1 - 3 x 1014 kg.
The brightness of the central condensation appears to be
varying with pseudo-periods of about 2 and 7 days, but it was

not possible to determine unambiguously the rotational state

of the nucleus. The various predicted plasma effects were
confirmed, including the existence of a bow shock and the
adjacent interplanetary medium was found to be
kinematically and magnetically extremely turbulent. Several
disconnection events in the ion tail were observed, also at the
time of the encounters, and the suspected connection with
magnetic field reversals was partly confirmed.

1986 - 1993: P/Halley follow-up

Much of the period after the Halley encounters has been spent
reducing the enormous amount of data on this comet.
Ground-based observations of a number of other bright
comets, including Wilson (1987 VII), Austin (1990 V),
P/Brorsen-Metcalf (1989 X) and Levy (1990 XX), have
served for comparison and have also resulted in several
important discoveries, for instance of some new parent
molecules, e.g. H2CO, H2S and CH3OH. Thanks to improved
instrumentation and reduction techniques, it has become
possible to observe fainter and more distant comets than ever
before. To some surprise it has been found that several
comets continue to be active many years after perihelion
passage, in some cases at heliocentric distances well beyond
10 AU; this has implications for the models of the nuclei.
Another space encounter with a comet took place on July 10,
1992, when the Giotto spacecraft flew through P/GriggSkjellerup during the Giotto Extended Mission (GEM), cf.
Schwehm and Grensemann (1992). A preliminary overview
of some of the early results was published by Boehnhardt et
al. (1992). The foremost virtue of GEM has been to provide
direct comparison between a very active and a supposedly
less active comet and to search for the underlying causes.
However, P/Grigg-Skjellerup was found to be at least as
active as expected, and the first presence of cometary ions
was detected at a distance of about 6 x 105 km, while a
magnetic disturbance resembling a bow shock or wave was
passed at about 1.5 x 104 km distance. A few dust impacts
occurred just after the closest approach which took place at
about 200 km from the nucleus.