The SOHO and other solar observing teams are really gearing up to make the most of this opportunity - even to the extent of altering/sacrificing some of their routine observations!
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1. STEREO/SECCHI: This will be the first spacecraft to get a clear view of the comet, and in fact it has been visible in our HI-2A imager for the past few days now, albeit faintly. As the comet approaches perihelion, we will perform our routine COR-2 observations until it reaches the COR-1 (inner coronagraph) camera late on the 15th. We will then focus our attention on that and the extreme ultraviolet (EUVI) instruments. The STEREO spacecraft are very far from Earth and so this only gives us a pretty small amount of data to send back. So we're going to have to go careful with what we do, and be clever about it. We are considering taking "subfield" images -- that is, only return, say, the top half of the image. We also have some on-board storage space that we can use but it still takes a long time to dump that data, and we're supposed to use that storage space to capture CME events. But I can make the case for an exception here.
2. SOHO/LASCO: The comet will enter LASCO C3 on the 14th at the very lower-left edge of the field of view. I predict it will be around mag 5 or 6 at this time. We are unable to squeeze any more images out of LASCO than we already do, simply because it uses early 1980's computer technology and just can't do things all that fast. So this means the standard 5 images per hour. What we can and will do, however, is use different exposure times and filters to capture as much science as we possibly can. Finally, the rarely-mentioned UVCS instrument on SOHO has the ability to point itself at a the track of the comet and get some observations. This has happened before with great success and so that's what we're shooting for again.
3. SDO: In July of this year, the NASA SDO spacecraft observed a comet evaporating in the solar corona: the first ever observations of its kind. I'm involved with a group of scientists that are still analyzing that event (exciting publication pending!), and we're naturally very excited about this opportunity. Unfortunately, it's now 6-months later which means that the comet will reach perihelion behind the Sun as seen from SDO. So SDO will only have a relatively brief window in which to see it before it disappears behind the solar limb. However, a group of us met yesterday to discuss this and the SDO team are planning to do some special operations to maximize our chances of observing the comet.
4. PROBA: I was delighted to receive an email from the European "PROBA" team. They have an EUV imager that they plan to try and use to observe the comet. From their message to me:
'PROBA2 is an ESA microsatellite pointing to the Sun from LEO [Low Earth Orbit]. Onboard is the SWAP EUV imager with a significantly larger FOV than SDO/AIA but imaging only in the 17nm bandpass (see eg http://proba2.oma.be/swap/data/mpg/movies/swap_cr_2116_yellow.mp4 ) We have made a little movie of how the Lovejoy comet is expected to pass through our FOV. It is available here: http://proba2.nicula.net/lovejoy_predict.mov
A couple of hours after the event, the data in movie format will appear here and in FITS format here.
Of course, it remains questionable if we will see anything at all in the 17nm bandpass.'
So rest assured that we are trying to make this the most well-observed Kreutz-group comet ever, and are trying to return as much science from it as we possibly can before it is forever lost to the Sun's searing corona! As always, keep checking back on this page as I update it with the latest news about the comet and the observing operations we have planned for it. "
http://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/index....birthday_comet
Cheers -