Preface-Jupiter family comets

摘要

Jupiter family comets (JFCs) are frequent visitors of the inner solar system, and thus provide a continuous source of information for the inquisitive mind, until they split or are turned off in another way. Since their appearance is predictable, advance and strategic scheduling of observational campaigns, in particular of fly-by missions are possible. This results in a high amount of ground- and space-based observations adopting various telescopes (European Southern Observatory, Keck Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Telescope and many more) and several encounter missions that took place since the beginning of the new millennium, giving us a tremendous amount of new results of JFCs.