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Originally Posted by VanderL
Of course I expect the water production rate from discharging to be equal to the actually observed amounts. But that probably is not what you want to know. If you give me a couple of days, I should be able to come up with something useful.
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I look forward to it.
If we assume that the water is produced by the interaction of hydorgen ions with oxides in what you believe to be a fundamentally rocky structure there us the interesting question of what fraction of the surface of an active cometary nucleus consists of oxides, and would your mechanism quickly (in terms of the mean lifetime of an active comet) exhaust the surface oxide layer without then being able to attack subsurface rock?
I don't anticipate a rigorous quantitative answer anytime soon, but would at least appreciate your comments on this point.
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I don't think water molecules generate the tail (I assume you mean the ion tail), I think I read somewhere that the ion tail is mostly ionised CO.
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I think that I should have stuck with coma...
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I'm not sure I understand this, what exactly has been demonstrated for the conventional model?
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The Deep Impact site claim that the quantity of surface ice is not sufficient to generate the quantity of water observed. (Note that does not say that there is not enough
sub-surface ice present.) I am hoping that the electric comet proponents can show if the hypothetical discharge process is sufficient, or not, to generate the observed quantities of water.