Abstract
Exploring one of the most pristine bodies in our solar system — a comet — with a spacecraft will be a great step towards a deeper understanding of our solar system's beginnings. We here present the advanced space experiment CoMA (cometarymatteranalyzer), which will be flown on NASA's cometary rendezvous and asteroid flyby mission CRAF. CoMA is a high resolution time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometer. It will analyze μm-sized cometary dust grains and cometary gases with an unprecedented mass resolution and will yield data about the elemental, isotopic, and molecular composition.
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Zscheeg, H., Kissel, J., Natour, G. et al. CoMA — An advanced space experiment forin situ analysis of cometary matter. Astrophys Space Sci 195, 447–461 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00646776
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00646776