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The close encounter of Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) with Mars on October19, 2014 presented an extremely rare opportunity to obtain the first flybyquality data of the nucleus and inner coma of a dynamically new comet. However,the comet's dust tail potentially posed an impact hazard to those spacecraft.To characterize the comet at large heliocentric distances, study its long-termevolution, and provide critical inputs to hazard modeling, we imaged C/SidingSpring with the Hubble Space Telescope when the comet was at 4.58, 3.77, and3.28 AU from the Sun. The dust production rate, parameterized by the quantityAf$\rho$, was 2500, 2100, and 1700 cm (5000-km radius aperture) for the threeepochs, respectively. The color of the dust coma is 5.0$\pm$0.3$\%$/100 nm forthe first two epochs, and 9.0$\pm$0.3$\%$/100 nm for the last epoch, andreddens with increasing cometocentric distance out to ~3000 km from thenucleus. The spatial distribution and the temporal evolution of the dust colorare most consistent with the existence of icy grains in the coma. Two jet-likedust features appear in the north-northwest and southeast directions projectedin the sky plane. Within each epoch of 1-2 hour duration, no temporalvariations were observed for either feature, but the PA of the southeasternfeature varied between the three epochs by ~30$^\circ$. The dust featuremorphology suggests two possible orientations for the rotational pole of thenucleus, (RA, Dec) = (295$^\circ\pm$5$^\circ$, +43$^\circ\pm$2$^\circ$) and(190$^\circ\pm$10$^\circ$, 50$^\circ\pm$5$^\circ$), or their diametricallyopposite orientations.

Constraining the Dust Coma Properties of Comet C/Siding Spring (2013 A1) at Large Heliocentric Distances