Comets hold the key to the understanding of our Solar System, its formation and its evolution, and to the fundamental plasma processes at work both in it and beyond it. A comet nucleus emits gas as it is heated by the sunlight. The gas forms the coma, where it is ionised, becomes a plasma, and eventually interacts with the solar wind. Besides these neutral and ionised gases, the coma also contains dust grains, released from the comet nucleus. As a cometary atmosphere develops when the comet travels through the Solar System, large-scale structures, such as the plasma boundaries, develop and disappear, while at planets such large-scale structures are only accessible in their fully grown, quasi-steady state. In situ measurements at comets enable us to learn both how such large-scale structures are formed or reformed and how small-scale processes in the plasma affect the formation and properties of these large scale structures. Furthermore, a comet goes through a wide range of parameter regimes during its life cycle, where either collisional processes, involving neutrals and charged particles, or collisionless processes are at play, and might even compete in complicated transitional regimes. Thus a comet presents a unique opportunity to study this parameter space, from an asteroid-like to a Mars- and Venus-like interaction. The Rosetta mission and previous fast flybys of comets have together made many new discoveries, but the most important breakthroughs in the understanding of cometary plasmas are yet to come. The Comet Interceptor mission will provide a sample of multi-point measurements at a comet, setting the stage for a multi-spacecraft mission to accompany a comet on its journey through the Solar System. This White Paper, submitted in response to the European Space Agency’s Voyage 2050 call, reviews the present-day knowledge of cometary plasmas, discusses the many questions that remain unanswered, and outlines a multi-spacecraft European Space Agency mission to accompany a comet that will answer these questions by combining both multi-spacecraft observations and a rendezvous mission, and at the same time advance our understanding of fundamental plasma physics and its role in planetary systems.

Ion acoustic waves were observed between 15 and 30 km from the centre of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the Rosetta spacecraft during its close flyby on 28 March 2015. There are two electron populations: one cold at k(B)T(e) approximate to 0.2 eV and one warm at k(B)T(e) approximate to 2 eV. The ions are dominated by a cold (a few hundredths of electronvolt) distribution of water group ions with a bulk speed of (3-3.7) km s(-1). A warm k(B)T(e) approximate to 6 eV ion population, which also is present, has no influence on the ion acoustic waves due to its low density of only 0.25 % of the plasma density. Near closest approach the propagation direction was within 50 degrees from the direction of the bulk velocity. The waves, which in the plasma frame appear below the ion plasma frequency f(pi) approximate to 2 kHz, are Doppler-shifted to the spacecraft frame where they cover a frequency range up to approximately 4 kHz. The waves are detected in a region of space where the magnetic field is piled up and draped around the inner part of the ionised coma. Estimates of the current associated with the magnetic field gradient as observed by Rosetta are used as input to calculations of dispersion relations for current-driven ion acoustic waves, using kinetic theory. Agreement between theory and observations is obtained for electron and ion distributions with the properties described above. The wave power decreases over cometocentric distances from 24 to 30 km. The main difference between the plasma at closest approach and in the region where the waves are decaying is the absence of a significant current in the latter. Wave observations and theory combined supplement the particle measurements that are difficult at low energies and complicated by spacecraft charging.

We report the detection of large-amplitude, quasi-harmonic density fluctuations with associated magnetic field oscillations in the region surrounding the diamagnetic cavity of comet 67P. Typical frequencies are similar to 0.1 Hz, corresponding to similar to 10 times the water and less than or similar to 0.5 times the proton gyro-frequencies, respectively. Magnetic field oscillations are not always clearly observed in association with these density fluctuations, but when they are, they consistently have wave vectors perpendicular to the background magnetic field, with the principal axis of polarization close to field-aligned and with a similar to 90 degrees phase shift with respect to the density fluctuations. The fluctuations are observed in association with asymmetric plasma density and magnetic field enhancements previously found in the region surrounding the diamagnetic cavity, occurring predominantly on their descending slopes. This is a new type of waves not previously observed at comets. They are likely ion Bernstein waves, and we propose that they are excited by unstable ring, ring-beam, or spherical shell distributions of cometary ions just outside the cavity boundary. These waves may play an important role in redistributing energy between different particle populations and reshape the plasma environment of the comet.

We report the observation by the Ion and Electron Sensor (IES) of energetic (>1 keV) electrons in the plasma environment of comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P). Most of the electrons in the cometary coma are expected to be of solar wind, photoionization, or electron impact origin and are therefore not expected to exceed some hundreds of eV in energy. During the Vega flybys of comet Halley, 1 keV electrons were also observed, and these are explained as having been accelerated by lower hybrid (LH) waves resulting from the two-stream instability involving the solar wind and pickup-ion flows. These waves resonate with the cyclotron motion of the ions and the longitudinal motion of electrons and are on the order of several Hz, at least in the case of 67P. We postulate that the energetic electrons we have observed intermittently during December 2015 through January 2016 are also the result of such a process and that Landau damping causes the acceleration and subsequent abrupt decrease in this energy (also seen at Halley). We show from this study an event on 19 January 2016 when IES simultaneously observed accelerated electrons, solar wind protons, water ions, and LH waves. A dispersion analysis shows that the ion-ion two-stream instability has positive growth rates for such waves during the observation period.

Using in situ measurements from different instruments on board the Rosetta spacecraft, we investigate the properties of the newly discovered low-frequency oscillations, known as singing comet waves, that sometimes dominate the close plasma environment of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. These waves are thought to be generated by a modified ion-Weibel instability that grows due to a beam of water ions created by water molecules that outgass from the comet. We take advantage of a cometary outburst event that occurred on 2016 February 19 to probe this generation mechanism. We analyze the 3D magnetic field waveforms to infer the properties of the magnetic oscillations of the cometary ion waves. They are observed in the typical frequency range (similar to 50 mHz) before the cometary outburst, but at similar to 20 mHz during the outburst. They are also observed to be elliptically right-hand polarized and to propagate rather closely (similar to 0-50 degrees) to the background magnetic field. We also construct a density dataset with a high enough time resolution that allows us to study the plasma contribution to the ion cometary waves. The correlation between plasma and magnetic field variations associated with the waves indicates that they are mostly in phase before and during the outburst, which means that they are compressional waves. We therefore show that the measurements from multiple instruments are consistent with the modified ion-Weibel instability as the source of the singing comet wave activity. We also argue that the observed frequency of the singing comet waves could be a way to indirectly probe the strength of neutral plasma coupling in the 67P environment.

A comet ionospheric model assuming the plasma moves radially outward with the same bulk speed as the neutral gas and not being subject to severe reduction through dissociative recombination has previously been tested in a series of case studies associated with the Rosetta mission at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It has been found that at low activity and within several tens of kilometers from the nucleus such models (which originally were developed for such conditions) generally work well in reproducing observed electron number densities, in particular when plasma production through both photoionization and electron-impact ionization is taken into account. Near perihelion, case studies have, on the contrary, shown that applying similar assumptions overestimates the observed electron number densities at the location of Rosetta. Here we compare Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis/Comet Pressure sensor-driven model results with Rosetta Plasma Consortium/Mutual Impedance Probe-derived electron number densities for an extended time period (2015 November through 2016 March) during the postperihelion phase with southern summer/spring. We observe a gradual transition from a state when the model grossly overestimates (by more than a factor of 10) the observations to being in reasonable agreement during 2016 March.

Abstract A major point of interest in cometary plasma physics has been the diamagnetic cavity, an unmagnetized region in the innermost part of the coma. Here we combine Langmuir and Mutual Impedance Probe measurements to investigate ion velocities and electron temperatures in the diamagnetic cavity of comet 67P, probed by the Rosetta spacecraft. We find ion velocities generally in the range 2?4 km/s, significantly above the expected neutral velocity 1 km/s, showing that the ions are (partially) decoupled from the neutrals, indicating that ion-neutral drag was not responsible for balancing the outside magnetic pressure. Observations of clear wake effects on one of the Langmuir probes showed that the ion flow was close to radial and supersonic, at least with respect to the perpendicular temperature, inside the cavity and possibly in the surrounding region as well. We observed spacecraft potentials  V throughout the cavity, showing that a population of warm (?5 eV) electrons was present throughout the parts of the cavity reached by Rosetta. Also, a population of cold ( ) electrons was consistently observed throughout the cavity, but less consistently in the surrounding region, suggesting that while Rosetta never entered a region of collisionally coupled electrons, such a region was possibly not far away during the cavity crossings.

We present Rosetta RPC case study from four events at various radial distance, phase angle and local time from autumn 2015, just after perihelion of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Pulse like (high amplitude, up to minutes in time) signatures are seen with several RPC instruments in the plasma density (LAP, MIP), ion energy and flux (ICA) as well as magnetic field intensity (MAG). Furthermore the cometocentric distance relative to the electron exobase is seen to be a good organizing parameter for the measured plasma variations. The closer Rosetta is to this boundary, the more pulses are measured. This is consistent with the pulses being filaments of plasma originating from the diamagnetic cavity boundary as predicted by simulations. 

The subject of this thesis is the evolution and dynamics of the plasma environment of a moderately active comet before, during and after its closest approach to the Sun. For over 2 years in 2014-2016, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft followed the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at distances typically between a few tens and a few hundred kilometers from the nucleus, the longest and closest inspection of a comet ever made. Its payload included a suite of five plasma instruments (the Rosetta Plasma Consortium, RPC), providing unprecedented in-situ measurements of the plasma environment in the inner coma of a comet.

In the first two studies, we use spacecraft potential measurements by the Langmuir probe instrument (LAP) to study the evolving cometary plasma environment. The spacecraft potential was mostly negative, often below -10 V and sometimes below -20 V, revealing the presence of warm (around 5-10 eV) coma photoelectrons, not effectively cooled by collisions with the relatively tenuous coma gas. The magnitude of the negative spacecraft potential depends on the electron density and traced heliocentric, cometocentric, seasonal and diurnal variations in cometary outgassing, consistent with production at or inside the cometocentric distance of the spacecraft as the dominant source of the observed plasma.

In the third study, we investigate ion velocities and electron temperatures in the diamagnetic cavity of the comet, combining LAP and Mutual Impedance Probe (MIP) measurements. Ion velocities were generally in the range 2-4 km/s, well above the expected neutral velocity of at most 1 km/s. Thus, the ions were (at least partially) decoupled from the neutrals already inside the diamagnetic cavity, indicating that ion-neutral drag was not responsible for balancing the outside magnetic pressure. The spacecraft potential was around -5 V throughout the cavity, showing that warm electrons were consistently present inside the cavity, at least as far in as Rosetta reached. Also, cold (below about 0.1 eV) electrons were consistently observed throughout the cavity, but less consistently in the surrounding region, suggesting that while Rosetta never entered a region of efficient collisional cooling of electrons, such a region was possibly not far away during the cavity crossings. Also, it reinforces the idea of previous authors that the intermittent nature of the cold electron component was due to filamentation of this cold plasma at or near the cavity boundary, possibly related to an instability of this boundary.

Finally, we report the detection of large-amplitude, quasi-harmonic density-fluctuations with associated magnetic field oscillations in association with asymmetric plasma and magnetic field enhancements previously found in the region surrounding the diamagnetic cavity, occurring predominantly on their descending slopes. Typical frequencies are around 0.1 Hz, i.e. about ten times the water and half the proton gyro-frequency, and the associated magnetic field oscillations, when detected, have wave vectors perpendicular to the background magnetic field. We suggest that they are Ion Bernstein waves, possibly excited by the drift-cyclotron instability resulting from the strong plasma inhomogeneities this region.

Context. Strong electron cooling on the neutral gas in cometary comae has been predicted for a long time, but actual measurements of low electron temperature are scarce. Aims. Our aim is to demonstrate the existence of cold electrons in the inner coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and show filamentation of this plasma. Methods. In situ measurements of plasma density, electron temperature and spacecraft potential were carried out by the Rosetta Langmuir probe instrument, LAP. We also performed analytical modelling of the expanding two-temperature electron gas. Results. LAP data acquired within a few hundred km from the nucleus are dominated by a warm component with electron temperature typically 5-10 eV at all heliocentric distances covered (1.25 to 3.83 AU). A cold component, with temperature no higher than about 0.1 eV, appears in the data as short (few to few tens of seconds) pulses of high probe current, indicating local enhancement of plasma density as well as a decrease in electron temperature. These pulses first appeared around 3 AU and were seen for longer periods close to perihelion. The general pattern of pulse appearance follows that of neutral gas and plasma density. We have not identified any periods with only cold electrons present. The electron flux to Rosetta was always dominated by higher energies, driving the spacecraft potential to order -10 V. Conclusions. The warm (5-10 eV) electron population observed throughout the mission is interpreted as electrons retaining the energy they obtained when released in the ionisation process. The sometimes observed cold populations with electron temperatures below 0.1 eV verify collisional cooling in the coma. The cold electrons were only observed together with the warm population. The general appearance of the cold population appears to be consistent with a Haser-like model, implicitly supporting also the coupling of ions to the neutral gas. The expanding cold plasma is unstable, forming filaments that we observe as pulses.