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J.T.T. Mäkinen (FMI, Finland), J.L. Bertaux, E. Quémerais (SA, France), W. Schmidt, E. Kyrölä, T. Summanen (FMI, Finland), R. Lallement (SA, France)
The Solar Wind Anisotropies (SWAN) instrument onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is a scanning Lyman-\alpha imager capable of imaging the entire sky within one day. It can be used to estimate cometary water production rates because the photodissociated neutral hydrogen resonantly scatters Solar Lyman-\alpha light. All comets brighter than approximate visual magnitude of 11 are routinely recorded by SWAN, and in addition to that, specific observing sessions are conducted with some comets. After the successful campaign with the dissipating comet C/1999 S4 [1], C/2001 A2 (LINEAR) has become a new interesting object for SWAN observations with its successive splitting events. We present results obtained with a new set of processing tools which enable higher spatial and temporal resolution than before.
[1] Science 292, 1326-1329 (2001).