We performed a spectroscopic survey for cometary volatiles with the Infrared Camera onboard the Japanese infrared satellite AKARI. The observations were carried out in the near-infrared wavelength range in the period from 2008 June to 2010 January. In this paper, we summarize the observations and results of the AKARI survey for the mixing ratios of major volatiles in comets. We derived the 2.5 − 5 μm spectra of 18 comets including both Oort cloud comets and Jupiter-family comets. Prominent emission bands in the observed spectra are the fundamental vibrational bands of water ( H2O ) at 2.7 μm and carbon dioxide ( CO2 ) at 4.3 μm . The fundamental vibrational band of carbon monoxide (CO) at 4.7 μm and the broad emission feature probably related to C-H bearing molecules can also be recognized around the 3.4 − 3.5 μm region in some comets. We detect CO2 in 17 out of 18 comets, and derived gas production rate ratios of CO2 with respect to H2O in 17 comets. We detect a reliable CO emission band only in three of the comets. Our data set provides the largest homogeneous database of CO2 / H2O ratios in comets obtained so far.

We constructed an unbiased asteroid catalog from the mid-infrared part of the All-Sky Survey with the Infrared Camera (IRC) on board AKARI. About 20% of the point source events recorded in the IRC All-Sky Survey observations were not used for the IRC Point Source Catalog in its production process because of a lack of multiple detection by position. Asteroids, which are moving objects on the celestial sphere, are included in these "residual events" We identified asteroids out of the residual events by matching them with the positions of known asteroids. For the identified asteroids, we calculated the size and albedo based on the Standard Thermal Model. Finally we had a new brand of asteroid catalog, which contains 5,120 objects, about twice as many as the IRAS asteroid catalog.

This is a proposal to probe local part of the interplanetary dust (IPD) cloud complex and retrieve mean volume emissivity of the local IPDs at mid-infrared wavelengths. This will be done by monitoring, with Infrared Camera (IRC) aboard the ASTRO-F, the annual modulation of the zodiacal emission. In pointing mode of the ASTRO-F mission the spacecraft can make attitude maneuvering over approximately ±1 ̊ range centered at solar elongation 90 ̊ in the ecliptic plane. The attitude maneuvering combined with high sensitivity of the IRC will provide us with a unique opportunity observationally to take derivatives of the zodiacal emission brightness with respect to the solar elongation. From the resulting differential of the brightness over the ±1̊ range, one can directly determine the mean volume emissivity of the local IPDs with a sufficient accuracy to de-modulate the annual emissivity variations due to the Earth's elliptical motion and the dis-alignment of the maximum IPD density plane with respect to the ecliptic. The non-zero eccentricity (e⊕= 0.0167) of the Earth's orbit combined with the sensitive temperature dependence of the Planck function would bring modulations of amplitude at least 3.34% to the zodiacal emission brightness at mid-infrared wavelengths, with which one may determine the IPD temperature T(r) and mean number density n(r) as functions of heliocentric distance r. This will in turn fix the power-law exponent δ in the relation T(r) = T_o(r/r_o)-δ for the dust temperature and v in n(r) = n_o(r/r_o)-v for the density. We discuss how one may de-couple the notorious degeneracy of cross-section, density, reference temperature To and exponent δ.