Ammonium salts on comet 67P: The distribution of carbon and nitrogen in the Solar System is thought to reflect the stability of carbon- and nitrogen-bearing molecules when exposed to the heat of the forming Sun. Comets have a low nitrogen-to-carbon ratio, which is contrary to expectations because they originate in the outer Solar System where nitrogen species should be common. Poch et al. used laboratory experiments to simulate cometary surfaces and compared the resulting spectra with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. They assigned a previously unidentified infrared absorption band to nitrogen-containing ammonium salts. The salts could contain enough nitrogen to bring the comet's nitrogen-to-carbon ratio in line with the Sun's. Science , this issue p. eaaw7462

Context. Since the orbital insertion of the Rosetta spacecraft, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P) has been mapped by OSIRIS camera and VIRTIS spectro-imager, producing a huge quantity of images and spectra of the comet’s nucleus. Aims. The aim of this work is to search for the presence of H2O on the nucleus which, in general, appears very dark and rich in dehydrated organic material. After selecting images of the bright spots which could be good candidates to search for H2O ice, taken at high resolution by OSIRIS, we check for spectral cubes of the selected coordinates to identify these spots observed by VIRTIS. Methods. The selected OSIRIS images were processed with the OSIRIS standard pipeline and corrected for the illumination conditions for each pixel using the Lommel-Seeliger disk law. The spots with higher I/F were selected and then analysed spectrophotometrically and compared with the surrounding area. We selected 13 spots as good targets to be analysed by VIRTIS to search for the 2 μm absorption band of water ice in the VIRTIS spectral cubes. Results. Out of the 13 selected bright spots, eight of them present positive H2O ice detection on the VIRTIS data. A spectral analysis was performed and the approximate temperature of each spot was computed. The H2O ice content was confirmed by modeling the spectra with mixing (areal and intimate) of H2O ice and dark terrain, using Hapke’s radiative transfer modeling. We also present a detailed analysis of the detected spots.

From August to November 2014 the Rosetta orbiter has performed an extensive observation campaign aimed at the characterization of 67P/CG nucleus properties and to the selection of the Philae landing site. The campaign led to the production of a global map of the illuminated portion of 67P/CG nucleus. During this prelanding phase the comet’s heliocentric distance decreased from 3.62 to 2.93 AU while Rosetta was orbiting around the nucleus at distances between 100 to 10 km. VIRTIS-M, the Visible and InfraRed Thermal Imaging Spectrometer – Mapping channel (Coradini et al., [2007] Space Sci. Rev., 128, 529–559) onboard the orbiter, has acquired 0.25–5.1 µm hyperspectral data of the entire illuminated surface, e.g. the north hemisphere and the equatorial regions, with spatial resolution between 2.5 and 25 m/pixel. I/F spectra have been corrected for thermal emission removal in the 3.5–5.1 µm range and for surface’s photometric response. The resulting reflectance spectra have been used to compute several Cometary Spectral Indicators (CSI): single scattering albedo at 0.55 µm, 0.5–0.8 µm and 1.0–2.5 µm spectral slopes, 3.2 µm organic material and 2.0 µm water ice band parameters (center, depth) with the aim to map their spatial distribution on the surface and to study their temporal variability as the nucleus moved towards the Sun. Indeed, throughout the investigated period, the nucleus surface shows a significant increase of the single scattering albedo along with a decrease of the 0.5–0.8 and 1.0–2.5 µm spectral slopes, indicating a flattening of the reflectance. We attribute the origin of this effect to the partial removal of the dust layer caused by the increased contribution of water sublimation to the gaseous activity as comet crossed the frost-line. The regions more active at the time of these observations, like Hapi in the neck/north pole area, appear brighter, bluer and richer in organic material than the rest of the large and small lobe of the nucleus. The parallel coordinates method (Inselberg [1985] Vis. Comput., 1, 69–91) has been used to identify associations between average values of the spectral indicators and the properties of the geomorphological units as defined by (Thomas et al., [2015] Science, 347, 6220) and (El-Maarr et al., [2015] Astron. Astrophys., 583, A26). Three classes have been identified (smooth/active areas, dust covered areas and depressions), which can be clustered on the basis of the 3.2 µm organic material’s band depth, while consolidated terrains show a high variability of the spectral properties resulting being distributed across all three classes. These results show how the spectral variability of the nucleus surface is more variegated than the morphological classes and that 67P/CG surface properties are dynamical, changing with the heliocentric distance and with activity processes.