Terrestrial cometary tail and lunar corona induced by small comets: Predictions for Galileo

A search for small comets near 1 AU is an objective of the Galileo mission. If small comets are as numerous and behave as has been proposed, two near‐Earth signatures of small comets should be observable by the UVS experiment on the Earth flybys of Galileo: ( 1 ) a comet‐like tail of Earth created by small comets that come close to Earth, break up and vaporize, but just miss the atmosphere and proceed back into interplanetary space, and (2) a corona surrounding the Moon induced by lunar impact of small comets.