Knowledge of GPGPU techniques is helpful for rapid model building and testing of scientific ideas. For example, the beautiful pictures taken by the ESA/Rosetta spacecraft of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko reveal jets of dust particles emitted from the comet. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a fast method to simulate thousands of dust particles around the comet and to find out if already the peculiar shape of this space-potato influences the dust-trajectories by its gravitational potential? At the Zuse-Institut in Berlin we joined forces between the distributed algorithm and visual data analysis groups to test this idea. But first an accurate shape model of the comet 67P C-G is required. As published in his blog, Mattias Malmer has done amazing work to extract a shape-model from the published navigation camera images.
- Starting from the shape model by Mattias Malmer, we obtain a re-meshed model with fewer triangles on the surface (we use about 20,000 triangles). The key-property of the new mesh is a homogeneous coverage of the cometary surface with almost equally sized triangle meshes. We don’t want better resolution and adaptive mesh sizes at areas with more complex features. Rather we are considering a homogeneous emission pattern without isolated activity regions. This is best modeled by mesh cells of equal area. Will this prescription yield nevertheless collimated dust jets? We’ll see…
- To compute the gravitational potential of such a surface we follow this nice article by JT Conway. The calculation later on stays in the rotating frame anchored to the comet, thus in addition the centrifugal and Coriolis forces need to be included.
- To accelerate the method, OpenCL comes to the rescue and lets one compute many trajectories in parallel. What is required are physical conditions for the starting positions of the dust as it flies off the surface. We put one dust-particle on the center of each triangle on the surface and set the initial velocity along the normal direction to typically 2 or 4 m/s. This ensures that most particles are able to escape and not fall back on the comet.
- To visualize the resulting point clouds of dust particles we have programmed an OpenGL visualization tool. We compute the rotation and sunlight direction on the comet to cast shadows and add activity profiles to the comet surface to mask out dust originating from the dark side of the comet.
This is what we get for May 3, 2015. The ESA/NAVCAM image is taken verbatim from the Rosetta/blog.
Read more about the physics and results in our arxiv article T. Kramer et al.: Homogeneous Dust Emission and Jet Structure near Active Cometary Nuclei: The Case of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (submitted for publication) and grab the code to compute your own dust trajectories with OpenCL at github.org/noma/covis
Trespassing allowed: from the classical to the quantum world (and back again) 
PS: Just came across the 3D Astrophysics blog, which also has a discussion about the arxiv publication Churi – 3D structure and its dust jets and lots of interesting and insightful posts on the 3D structure of astrophysical objects.