...
The most important part of the campaign will be between Mid-December 2009 to Mid-June 2010; this is the time interval with good visibility for optical/TeV instruments. The goal for this time interval is to sample DAILY the peaks of the 2 bumps in the SED of Mrk421 (optical/X-ray and GeV/TeV). We have already allocated resources to do that at various energy ranges with various insrtruments (GRT,KVA,RXTE,MAGIC). I am currently trying to involve many other instruments. The current (very preliminary) observing schedule can be found here. This schedule will be updated during the following days with new instrument observations.
Swift XRT and UVOT data could be extremely useful for the proper characterization of the evolution of the SED. I submitted a Swift Cycle 6 proposal to monitor Mrk421 (see proposal here), but even it were accepted, the observations from this proposal would not start till April 2010. Therefore, we need an additional (ToO) proposal that provide us with Swift observations up to April 2010. We submitted similar ToO proposals to perform monitoring of Mrk421 (and Mrk501) for the campaigns on 2009. Those proposals were successful and provided us with very valuable data for those campaigns. The nice thing is that Mrk421 is very bright at UV/X-ray frequencies and hence a 1ks observation is already good enough to have good quality spectra and UV data points. Therefore, we can monitor this source over long time with little overall observing time.
For this proposal, we request one 1ks long observation every 2 days, starting from December 8th and finishing on April 1st. Altogether this is only 58ks which will provide very valuable information for the characterization of the evolution of the SED with time during 4 months.
Scientific Justification
...