The spectroscopy of comets: Introductory remarks

Emphasis in cometary spectroscopy is on production rates, becuase they open the door to more fundamental clues about the origin and the history of the solar system, through the understanding of comet chemistry. In order to establish production rates quantitatively, suggestion are provided, in particular: to study the lifetimes of all hypothetical parents, against all processes of decay, namely photodissociations, photoionizations and ion-molecule reactions; and to study the velocity of all molecular fragments resulting from all the decay processes, through the balance sheet of the energy distribution before and after each decay process.