Expected Comet Observations with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, currently under construction in Chile, will conduct the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) producing an unprecedented astronomical time-domain catalog, including observations of over 5 million Solar System Small Bodies, discovering roughly an order of magnitude more objects then are currently known, with many of these objects receiving hundreds of observations in multiple bandpasses. This work examines the expected observations of dynamically different comets through the analysis of the recently released Rubin Data Preview 0.3 (DP0.3). The DP0.3 simulation includes hundreds of millions of detections of millions of objects, real and synthetic, including trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), main belt asteroids (MBAs), interstellar objects (ISOs), Hildas and Trojan asteroids, long-period comets, and near-Earth objects (NEOs). We find that a large number of comets observed in the survey will have their orbits well sampled across multiple bandpasses, indicating that the Survey will be able to provide not only transformative comet population level science, but greatly contribute to the study of individual comets, with the faint limit and rapid cadence of observation producing regular observations of comets that are currently not realistic through non-survey means.