The Deep Impact Earth-Based Campaign K. J. Meech? Univ. Hawaii, Institute for Astronomy, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, HI 96822 M. F. A'Hearn Dept. of Astronomy, Univ. Maryland, College Park MD 20742-2421 Y. R. Fern´andez Univ. Hawaii, Institute for Astornomy, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, HI 96822 C. M. Lisse, H. A. Weaver Johns Hopkins Univ.; APL, Space Dept., 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 20723-6099 N. Biver Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, 5 Place Jules Jansses, 92190 Meudon, France and L. M. Woodney Dept. of Physics. Univ. of Central Florida, P.O. Box 162385, Orlando, FL 32816-2385 ? Author for correspondence: E-mail: [email protected] (Received September 15 2004; Accepted in final form February 3 2005) ABSTRACT Prior to the selection of the comet 9P/Tempel 1 as the Deep Impact mission target, the comet was not well-observed. From 1999 through the present there has been an intensive world-wide observing campaign designed to obtain mission critical information about the target nucleus, including the nucleus size, albedo, rotation rate, rotation state, phase function, and the develop- ment of the dust and gas coma. The specific observing schemes used to obtain this information and the resources needed are presented here. The Deep Impact mission is unique in that part of the mission observations will rely on an Earth-based (ground and orbital) suite of comple- mentary observations of the comet just prior to impact and in the weeks following. While the impact should result in new cometary activity, the actual physical outcome is uncertain, and the Earth-based observations must allow for a wide range of post-impact phenomena. A world-wide coordinated effort for these observations is described. Keywords: Deep Impact, Earth observing 1 1. Introduction serving only every other apparition (∼ 11 year in- tervals). Although the comet was discovered in The selection of the Deep Impact mission tar- 1867 (Yeomans et al. 2005), there have thus been get was driven primarily by launch and orbital dy- relatively few physical observations of the comet namics considerations (A'Hearn et al. 2005; Blume prior to its selection for the Deep Impact mission. 2005) and not by what was known about the po- From the inclusion of the non-gravitational param- tential target. Nevertheless, the success of the mis- eters in the orbit solution for the comet, it was sion is greatly enhanced if much is known about suggested that the pattern of outgassing was rel- the target a-priori. This is of benefit not only for atively unchanged during the last 7 apparitions. planning the encounter sequences, but is especially Most of the existing physical observations were of important in the case of the Deep Impact mission the gas and dust coma around the time of the two target, 9P/Tempel 1, because the goal is to look perihelion passages of 1983 and 1994 (Lisse et al. for post-impact changes in the outgassing which 2005), along with some limited information about will be indicative of the properties of the pristine the nucleus rotation (Belton et al. 2005). nucleus interior. To this extent, more so than for In order to prepare for the encounter, the Deep any other mission, it is very important to estab- Impact team has undertaken a large observing lish a good baseline of observations which char- campaign of nucleus characterization. The sec- acterize the nucleus prior to the encounter. Fur- tions below discuss the rationale and opportuni- thermore the pre-impact ground observations will ties for the observations; many of the results are verify the capability of ground-based techniques presented in Belton et al. (2005). for basic cometary nucleus reconnaissance. The Deep Impact mission has been designed to 2. The Pre-Encounter Period provide good observing conditions from Earth. Al- though the flyby spacecraft of the Deep Impact 2.1. Size and Albedo mission will make unique in-situ measurements, Knowledge of the size and shape of the nucleus the constraints of space missions limit us to imag- and its albedo is important for the autonomous ing and near-infrared spectroscopy in an 800-sec targeting software and in order to calculate instru- interval from time of impact until the flyby space- ment exposure times. To ensure targeting that is craft has flown past the point of observability of not too close to the limb such that the impactor the impact site. A unique aspect of this mission might miss, it is crucial to know the size and shape is the observing program planned from Earth and of the nucleus. If the albedo is higher than as- Earth-orbit at the time of impact. These observa- sumed, the size will be correspondingly smaller tions are designed to complement the spacecraft and we would have to adopt a strategy that en- data during the period surrounding encounter, and sures that we hit the target without optimizing will continue long after the event, since long-lived the observability. If the albedo is lower than as- changes in the behavior are a plausible outcome sumed, the size will be correspondingly larger and of the experiment. However it is important to we can optimize the targeting for observability of note that the specific outcome of the impact is un- the crater at closest approach. known; indeed, that is one significant motivation for the mission in the first place. We and our col- Simultaneous optical and thermal infrared ob- laborators have set up a ground-based observing servations of the bare nucleus can give an estimate campaign that will allow us to observe whatever of both the instantaneous nucleus size and geo- phenomena are created by the impact. metric albedo. The technique relies on the fact that the flux in the optical is proportional to the 1.1. Selection of DI Target { What we nucleus cross section, albedo and phase function, Knew whereas the thermal flux is related to the nucleus size, thermal phase function and nucleus emissiv- At the time of target selection, 9P/Tempel 1 ity (Lebofsky & Spencer, 1989). As seen in Fig- was known to be a typical Jupiter-family low- ure 1, which is a light curve combining CCD data activity comet (A'Hearn et al. 1995) rarely bright since 1999 with data from the International Comet as seen from Earth, and was well placed for ob- Quarterly, the onset of activity typically occurs for 2 this comet between 600-400 days pre-perihelion, at Inverting a photometric light curve for an aster- a heliocentric distance r around 3 to 4 AU. How- oid or an inactive comet is non-trivial. In increas- ever, signal-to-noise calculations for detecting a ing order of difficulty, one can obtain the (i) side- nucleus of the size of 9P/Tempel 1 in the ther- real rotation period and spin axis, (ii) the shape; mal IR at the Keck 10m telescope indicated that and (iii) the light scattering properties (Magnus- this would only be feasible inside r < 2.5 AU, at son et al. 1989). Ideally, the nucleus should be which time the comet would be active. inactive, but as bright as possible and near oppo- Thus, when completely devoid of coma, the nu- sition in order to obtain the maximum observing cleus would be too faint to detect in the thermal time per night. In order to place constraints on IR even with the 10-m Keck telescope. Therefore the rotation pole, we want at least four good light a compromise was made, and data were obtained curves without coma contamination; a unique pole post-perihelion in August 2000 when the comet solution can be obtained in the ideal case only with was at r = 2.54 AU and still very active, neces- at least three light curves. These should be at ◦ sitating significant modeling to remove the coma low phase angle (α < 20 , although it is better ◦ contribution and to determine the rotational phase if α < 10 ) so that it is possible to associate light at the time of observations (Fern´andez et al. 2003; curve features with the shape of the nucleus rather Belton et al. 2005). than the specifics of the light scattering from the The only other opportunity to obtain data particulate surface. In addition, we should obtain on the bare nucleus meant using the Spitzer the observations over a range of ecliptic longitudes Space Telescope. Director's discretionary time in order to sample different geometries. Unfortu- was awarded for this project so that we could ob- nately, most comets begin to become active out tain rotationally resolved IR fluxes during early near r ∼ 5-6 AU (Meech & Svorenˇ 2005), and as 2004. Table 1 presents a summary of the opportu- the nuclei are quite small with low albedos (Meech nities for observing the comet that are compatible et al. 2004), this means that the inactive nucleus with the Spitzer Space Telescope observing win- is quite faint, requiring large telescopes to achieve dows. We were also awared General Observer observations of adequate S/N. time in Cycle 1 to observe the comet in 2005 after The best periods for obtaining data for the ro- activity had started. tational light curve are shown in Table 2. Because the rotation period was known to be long and that 2.2. Rotation State aliasing effects from the daily sampling could be a problem, we tried to coordinate observations be- Observed brightness variations of a comet may tween observatories separated by longitude. Inten- be caused by: the activity, which changes the ef- sive international observing campaigns were con- fective scattering area; the changing geocentric ducted during the 2000, 2001 and 2002 opportu- and heliocentric distances; the rotation of the nu- nities.