Host: The Japanese Society for Planetary Sciences: Local Organizing Committee for 2006 Fall Meeting
73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann is one of the typical Jupiter Family Comets with the period of 5.4 years, and is a split comet which had split into 4 nuclei during 1995 appearance, and the recurrence of two or more fragment nuclei was observed in 2001. In this year, 2006, the both of main fragment C and fragment B were re-detected, additionally more than ten small fragments were detected. Moreover, the comet approached about 0.08AU to the earth in the middle of May this year so that it was a good chance to observe the inner coma of the splitting comet in detail.
The imaging polarimetry of 73P was performed by using "Polarimetric Imager for Comets (PICO)" attached to 50cm Telescope at Mitaka, NAOJ. We observed fragments B and C since the brightness of these reached to 8 mag. on late April. Especially, the fragment B has repeated outburst on early May, therefore, it was observed intensively.
We report the early results of the observations and make a comparison between fragments B and C, as well as discuss the difference of dust grains of these two fragments.
