The understanding of comet trails are fundamental to understanding the composition and origin of comets, the origin of the zodiacal dust cloud, the origin of meteor streams, and the hazardous…

The understanding of comet trails are fundamental to understanding the composition and origin of comets, the origin of the zodiacal dust cloud, the origin of meteor streams, and the hazardous environment for spacecraft approaching comets. Trails appear as long contrail-like structures in the sky and consist of MM-CM sized particles emitted at low velocities from jupiter-family comets (JFCS). Their systematic study requires a space-based survey telescope operating in the thermal infrared. They were discovered by the first such satellite, the infrared astronomical satellite (IRAS), launched in 1983. Twenty-seven years later, the sky was surveyed a second time by the wide-field infrared survey explorer (WISE), with detectors 100 times more sensitive than IRAS. IRAS detected 8 trails associated with known JFCS. WISE may be able to detect debris in the orbits of 423 JFCS. We propose to undertake a systematic study of the WISE data to find all the trails detected by WISE, determine their thermal and physical characteristics, and share this information with the planetary community by creating a database of all WISE image sets in which trails are detected and creating catalogs of trail characteristics and archiving them in the NASA planetary data system. This team is led by the scientists that conducted and published the original IRAS dust trail survey and scientists that were members of the WISE science team. The NASA planetary science division provided support for the WISE mission, and the proposed work is relevant to the planetary mission data analysis program by (GREATLY) enhancing the science return from planetary data obtained by the WISE mission, and increasing the scientific participation in further advancing that return by creating baseline and higher-level mission products that scientists interested in the study of trails can easily access and utilize.