Description
The last decade has seen the advent of large field of view Integral Field Spectrographs (IFUs) for observations at optical wavelengths. These instruments, such as MUSE on the 8-m Very Large Telescope, present an interesting opportunity to characterize the distant activity of comets, due to the combination of spatial and spectral information they provide. Large scale IFUs on ground-based telescopes can be particularly useful to probe cometary activity drivers that are typically difficult to measure from the ground, including H$_2$O, CO, CO$_2$- and potentially O$_2$ - through the study of some of their dissociation products such as oxygen. IFUs are generally very sensitive to faint extended emission and are thus ideal tools for the observations of active small bodies in the solar system. This talk will explore how IFUs can contribute to our understanding of the distant activity of small bodies by mapping forbidden oxygen lines and how future IFUs on even larger telescopes will likely push this opportunity even further.
