A perfectly reasonable suggestion, and I'll pass the question on to an advisor.
No, not an
advisor, how about an EC physicist.
I do think you need to re-formulate your question with respect to available protons, however, since the entire volume of the coma will be available for transactions with the solar wind, not just a hemispheric surface area on a tiny nucleus.
No the available protons per second (that would be particle flux) are given by the (slowed down) solar wind density. Unless you think that the protons just keep on hanging there in the coma and from far away start "raining" onto the cometary nucleus.
I hope you do know that in the cometosheath the plasma flows just in the solar wind direction down the tail.
Oberervations and measurements have actually shown this.
Also, keep in mind that the role of clays on the surface (potentially a critical pointer to formative processes), AND the role of accumulated solar PROTONS on the surface, as already suggested by Russian astrophysicist Subhon Ibadov, will all have to be taken into consideration.
Any water molecule (or OH for all I care) which is released is one proton lost. If we see 1 pint of water per second coming off the comet (just accept this for the moment to entertain me), that means that there are 0.5 liters of water per second, with the 18 proton masses per water molelcule, this means that there is 0.5 liter = 0.5 kg = 1.5 10
25 molecules are released per second.
The solar wind brings in, 4 km circular comet, a solar wind velocity of 300 km/s, a solar wind density of 1 particle per cubic centimeter leads to a proton influx of 4 10
18 protons per second. So there is a discrepancy of more than 6 orders of magnitude in proton influx and proton (water) outflux.
More on Ibadov later, since he highlights the "electric discharge mechanism of cometary outbursts" (his words, not mine).
Can you link to the published papers of Ibadov? I see some of them on ADS, from the 1990s, and none of them seem to be even cited once.
Oh...would y'all agree that the Ibadov citation counts as evidence for a shift in thinking? Look him up.
Not until you actually show a real paper of this guy.
ETA:
Just looked through a 1998 paper of Ibadov. He wants the X-ray emission of comets created by the collision of high energy cometary dust and zodiacal dust, which would create a "plasma blob" which somehow with a sudden equation would give an X-ray luminosity. Too bad that is has been shown that the X-rays that are emitted fit exactly laboratory experiments with highly ionized heavies (e.g. O
7+) from the Sun which charge-exchange with a neutral from the comet.