Parker Solar Probe Observations of a Dust Trail in the Orbit of (3200) Phaethon

Abstract

We present the identification and preliminary analysis of a dust trail following the orbit of (3200) Phaethon as seen in white light images recorded by the Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument on the NASA Parker Solar Probe (PSP) mission. During PSP's first solar encounter in November 2018, a dust trail following Phaethon's orbit was visible for several days and crossing two fields of view. Preliminary analyses indicate this trail to have a visual magnitude of 15.8 $\pm$0.3 per pixel and a surface brightness of 25.0 mag arcsec${}^{-2}$ as seen by PSP/WISPR from a distance of $\sim$0.2 au from the trail. We estimate the total mass of the stream to be $\sim (0.4-1.3)\times 10^{12}$ kg, which is consistent with, though slightly underestimates, the assumed mass of the Geminid stream but is far larger than the current dust production of Phaethon could support. Our results imply that we are observing a natural clustering of at least some portion of the Geminid meteor stream through its perihelion, as opposed to dust produced more recently from perihelion activity of Phaethon.

14 Pages, 7 Figures; Accepted to ApJS (Parker Solar Probe Special Edition)

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Parker Solar Probe: Four Years of Discoveries at Solar Cycle Minimum
• Overview of the remote sensing observations from PSP solar encounter 10 with perihelion at 13.3 Rsun
• Continued PSP/WISPR Observations of a Phaethon-related Dust Trail
• Formation, Structure, and Detectability of the Geminids Meteoroid Stream
• Helios spacecraft data revisited: Detection of cometary meteoroid trails by in-situ dust impacts
• Electrostatic Dust Ejection From Asteroid (3200) Phaethon With the Aid of Mobile Alkali Ions at Perihelion
• Encounter of Parker Solar Probe and a Comet-like Object During Their Perihelia: Model Predictions and Measurements
• Perihelion Activity of (3200) Phaethon Is Not Dusty: Evidence from STEREO/COR2 Observations
• A Detailed Analysis of a Magnetic Island Observed by WISPR on Parker Solar Probe
• Age of Geminids Derived from the Statistics of Meteoroid Orbits