Comet Lulin arrives tonight - break out your telescopes

When emissions from these two comets are added to the data the team has already accumulated, the information should help give astronomers a better handle on how conditions in different parts of the solar system affected the chemical makeup of comets and, over time, how that makeup was altered with each pass by the sun.

Meanwhile, National Aeronautics and Space Administration's SWIFT spacecraft has been gathering images of the comet at ultraviolet and x-ray wavelengths. The research team using the craft, led by the University of Leicester's (England) Jenny Carter, also is interested in analyzing Lulin's emissions.

At the end of January, for instance, the comet was unleashing about 800 gallons of water (about $17,000 worth of Evian) a second, according to team member Dennis Bodewits, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Upcoming comet encounters

And opportunities for new insights into comets don't stop there. NASA has two extended missions -- Deep Impact (now EPOXI) and Stardust (now Stardust-NExT)-- bound for comet encounters over the next two years.

Deep Impact, you may recall, buzzed Comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, and launched a projectile at the comet. The two collided, releasing as much energy as nearly 5 tons of TNT. The collision carved a crater in the comet's nucleus. But the Deep Impact spacecraft got a very limited look at the crater, thanks to all the dust the impact kicked up.

The Stardust-NExT spacecraft is slated to fly by Tempel 1 in 2011. If all goes well, it will capture images of the crater as well as measure the properties of the dust it encounters. Since Stardust already has sampled Comet Wild 2 (and returned those samples to Earth), the Tempel 1 flyby gives astronomers a unique opportunity to observe different comets with the same instruments.

Meanwhile, EPOXI is scheduled to fly by Comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, 2010. And NASA's New Horizons mission is outbound for Pluto and its companion Charon, and then into the Kuiper Belt to buzz one or two objects there. The Pluto flyby currently is slated for July 14, 2015. Look for the Kuiper object encounters in 2016 and 2020.

And if for some reason you miss Lulin -- you know, cloudy skies, wrong setting on the alarm clock, those kinds of things -- try this video.

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