PSI Senior Scientist Nalin Samarasinha and Senior Scientist Beatrice Mueller regularly use telescopes at the Kitt Peak National Observatory located 56 miles southwest of Tucson to study comets. Samarasinha is shown here in the control room of the 2.1-meter telescope at Kitt Peak during a recent run preparing to make observations of Comet Encke.

Their previous observing campaign on Comet Hartley 2 – the target comet of the NASA EPOXI mission – has resulted in two publications and two additional publications based on their Hartley 2 images are in progress.