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There is more to comets than an outgassing dirty snowball or snowy dirtball; the nucleus and the escaping gas and dust interact
with the solar radiation and wind in a complex way. In this presentation we will investigate some of the details of this interaction:
what happens to the escaping gas? What different regions are created around the comet's nucleus? How is a cometary tail created and how
can it be lost? What will be measured by Rosetta and Philae? How does the cometary coma generate X-rays? Using the magnetic field and plasma
data from earlier missions we can already get a picture of what is going on near the comets that have already been visited by earlier
spacecraft (1P/Halley, 21P/Giacobini-Zinner and 27P/Grigg-Skjellerup). We will apply the results to make predictions for and comparisons
with the data from Rosetta at 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Pretty pictures and plasma physics, we have it all.
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