A NOTE ON THE VERY SMALL GRAINS (VSGS) OBSERVED AT HALLEY COMET

The most striking feature in the spatial distribution of the smallest dust grains observed at Halley's comet by the VEGA-1 spacecraft is the sharp glitch at a cometocentric distance of about 180000 km, which approximately corresponds to the so-called cometopause inside which the contaminated solar wind plasma was rapidly cooled. We propose that this glitch was caused by the electrostatic disruption of larger composite grains which rapidly charged up as they traversed the cometopause. The clear asymmetry in the distribution between the inbound and outbound portion of the spacecraft trajectory is also consistent with the dynamical effects of grain charging although other causes are not excluded.