No spacecraft visiting a comet has been equipped with instruments to directly measure the static electric field. However, the electric field can occasionally be estimated indirectly by observing its effects on the ion velocity distribution. We present such observations made by the Rosetta spacecraft on 19th of April 2016 when comet 67P was at a low outgassing rate and the plasma environment was relatively homogeneous. The ion velocity distributions show the cometary ions on the first half of their gyration. We estimate the bulk drift velocity and the gyration speed from the distributions. By using the local measured magnetic field and assuming an E x B drift of the gyrocentre, we get an estimate for the average electric field driving this ion motion. We analyse a period of 13h, during which the plasma environment does not change drastically. We find that the average strength of the electric field is 0.21mV/m. The direction of the electric field is mostly anti-sunward. This is in agreement with previous results based on different methods

At a low activity comet the plasma is distributed in an asymmetric way. The hybrid simulation code Amitis is used to look at the spatial evolution of ion velocity distribution functions (VDFs), from the upstream solar wind to within the comet magnetosphere where the solar wind is heavily mass-loaded by the cometary plasma. We find that the spatial structures of the ions and fields form a highly asymmetric, half-open induced magnetosphere. The VDFs of solar wind and cometary ions vary drastically for different locations in the comet magnetosphere. The shape of the VDFs differ for different species. The solar wind protons show high anisotropies that occasionally resemble partial rings, in particular at small cometocentric distances. A second, decoupled, proton population is also found. Solar wind alpha particles show similar anisotropies, although less pronounced and at different spatial scales. The VDFs of cometary ions are mostly determined by the structure of the electric field. We perform supplementary dynamic particle backtracing to understand the flow patterns of solar wind ions that lead to these anisotropic distributions. This tracing is needed to understand the origin of cometary ions in a given part of the comet magnetosphere. The particle tracing also aids in interpreting observed VDFs and relating them to spatial features in the electric and magnetic fields of the comet environment.

We present partial ring distributions of solar wind protons observed by the Rosetta spacecraft at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The formation of ring distributions is usually associated with high activity comets, where the spatial scales are larger than multiple ion gyroradii. Our observations are made at a low-activity comet at a heliocentric distance of 2.8 AU on April 19th, 2016, and the partial rings occur at a spatial scale comparable to the ion gyroradius. We use a new visualisation method to simultaneously show the angular distribution of median energy and differential flux. A fitting procedure extracts the bulk speed of the solar wind protons, separated into components parallel and perpendicular to the gyration plane, as well as the gyration velocity. The results are compared with models and put into context of the global comet environment. We find that the formation mechanism of these partial rings of solar wind protons is entirely different from the well-known partial rings of cometary pickup ions at high-activity comets. A density enhancement layer of solar wind protons around the comet is a focal point for proton trajectories originating from different regions of the upstream solar wind. If the spacecraft location coincides with this density enhancement layer, the different trajectories are observed as an energy-angle dispersion and manifest as partial rings in velocity space.