Check out our recent paper published at PSJ, A Sublime Opportunity: The Dynamics of Transitioning Cometary Bodies and the Feasibility of In Situ Observations of The Evolution of Their Activity. We look into how Centaurs are scattered into the inner Solar System, and propose a mission to rendezvous and orbit match with a comet as it transitions into the inner Solar System for the first time in its lifetime.
A fiducial trajectory from the Jupiter-Sun L2 point to orbit match LD2. The orbits of LD2, Jupiter and the hypothetical spacecraft are shown in blue, red and grey respectively. Points along each trajectory correspond to evenly spaced sampling of the trajectory through time, where large and small circles correspond to two different cadences. The spacecraft is sent in 2061 before LD2 experiences its closest approach to Jupiter, flies for 2 years, and rendezvous in 2063, after the close approach when the Delta V between Jupiter and LD2 is small, in order to optimize the orbit matching efficiency. The required Delta V from Jupiter's co-orbital location is 0.9 km/s.