The cometary model of dust environments (ComMoDE)

Abstract The Cometary Model of Dust Environment (ComMoDE) is a software based on a time-efficient and highly flexible dust model to support the planning and operation of future cometary missions. The ESA Comet Interceptor mission further motivated the implementation of this model in dedicated software. Its goal is to perform a flyby at an as-yet unknown, dynamically new comet or interstellar object. This makes it difficult to constrain the expected dust environment. To address this issue, ComMoDE is specifically designed to allow for a large range of different parameters. The model is able to account for the solar radiation pressure, simple day-night asymmetries and variations in the dust production rate that may result from nucleus rotation. It is only valid outside of the acceleration region. The outputs of the model are the dust number densities for a chosen number of particle size bins, which are also used by the model to derive the number densities, fluxes, fluences and the total impacted mass along chosen flyby trajectories. ComMoDE has been tested extensively and is able to reproduce the measurements of the total impact mass on the Giotto spacecraft at comet 1P/Halley.