Demonstrating Coma Factory: A Tool to Simulate and Analyze Comae Images of Comets

The comae features of comets are widely used to interpret processes occurring in the coma and to derive physical properties of the nucleus. We have developed a 3-D Monte Carlo model to simulate images with coma features that has successfully been used by us to interpret comae and nuclei properties in the past. We are making this code available to the wider astronomy community through a user-friendly web interface (hereafter known as Coma Factory) and additionally via a PyPI Python package containing the source codes used in the web interface. We also provide detailed tutorials at the web interface and Jupyter Notebooks with examples to guide the user on the effective and efficient usage of the Coma Factory. We provide the capability to model comae corresponding to first-generation species (e.g., dust, H2O), second-generation species (e.g., CN, OH), and third-generation species (e.g., C2). Also, the users can model the effects due to radiation pressure. At the DPS meeting, we will demonstrate the Coma Factory web interface and its capabilities to the community with specific examples including sample input parameters and corresponding coma images generated by Coma Factory to highlight its capabilities for a variety of scenarios. We also solicit the user feedback to enable a friendly, seamless, and useful user experience. We gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the NASA PDART Program through award 80NSSC21K0881.