Minutes for telecon of March 6 2001 (Mathis)

NO TELECON NEXT WEEK! (UW's spring break)

Present: Babler, Benjamin, Churchwell, Dickey, Alejandro Esquivel,
Jennifer Hoffman, Marsden, Mathis, Meade, Stolovy, Watson, Whitney,
Wolff, Wolfire. (BU is on spring break this week)

1. Wolfire discussed the Zody figures he had emailed earlier. A bug in
the previous set has been corrected. Contrary to his explanatory
email, the figure "8 microns @ earth, 8/22/2004" has the SPOT
correction as the solid line and the NED as the dotted. The similar
figure for 3.5 mu has the reverse. His figures show differences
between the two models of ~10% for 8 mu (plotted on a separate image)
and 25% for 3.5 mu. Why do these occur? Mark will see if other dates,
solar elongations for the calculation provide similar results. At 3.5
mu, ~50% of Zody is scattered. How bright is the Galactic plane at
various longitudes, compared to Zody?

2. Ed discussed the relation that Martin Cohen might have to
GLIMPSE. He sent Ed an email (March 1, circulated to the team)
that says that he would like to apply for a NASA LTSA that has
significant implications for GLIMPSE. If we are interested, he would
like guidance from us regarding his proposal. He might be able to
contribute to the late stages of Phase 1 and to participate in the
scientific analysis. He is not interested in such tasks as developing
the pipeline. He has produced a fancy model of the sky (called "SKY")
that might be of help to us, and can perhaps provide a list of
calibration sources that might help us check on the validation from
SSC. (Can the process be automated?)

We would gain a member at no cost to us, and Cohen is widely known to
be an excellent scientist. The current LTSA cycle will not have
finding until May '02 or later, so his participation in Phase 1 may be
limited. There was a general sense of approval, but further comments
might have to await the distribution of the email to the full team.

3. Christer Watson summarized our revised observing strategy. Chip went 
to SSC last week and found that they agreement that bypassing SPOT is
not 
only a good idea but a necessity for us since we have to prepare over
1000 
AORs. Marsden pointed out that the present SPOT assumes 12 sec
integrations 
instead of our 2 sec exposures, so SPOT would not be helpful anyway
until 
it is changed.

The initial observing strategy needs modification, but the April 6
deadline still seems realistic for providing a flexible and essential
tool for producing AORs on a short time scale. Originally we hoped to
observe almost continuously for about two days per IRAC cycle. However, 
the data handling on the spacecraft is limited to 4 Gbyte/12 hr, which 
that strategy would violate. We're now limited to 2.5 hr/12 hr period. 
With that, we can observe a 2 deg by ~4 deg area in a 3-day IRAC cycle, 
with each point on the sky observed twice.  The plan will still produce 
a high efficiency.

Chip found that SPOT has sophisticated visualization tools that we can
possibly use. These will be helpful both for planning and tracking the
observations.

3. Barb Whitney discussed a meeting with her, Ed, Marilyn, Brian, and
Rhodri 
Evans (Al
Harper's postdoc at UChicago) working on the HAWC FIR FIR camera for
SOFIA
(53, 88 155, 215 mu).  The GLIMPSE and HAWC groups have some
complementary 
science. Evans has written data reduction software and is interested in
sharing
and/or providing advice or expertise as the need arises. Joel Kastner
has 
also written mosaicing software that might be helpful.

4. Ed: 4 preliminary examples for a logo are on the web. Wendy Ashman
will come
by Ed's office tomorrow to discuss them. One that may be interesting is
a face-on 
simulation of the Galaxy. Tom Steiman-Cameron might be able to furnish
one. Wolfire has
contacted him about this, but so far we have had no response.  Please
relay 
any ideas abou the logo to Ed.

5. Ed: A SIRTF Legacy Science Working Group Web page has been
established that 
includes information on the SIRTF instruments, announcements, deadlines,
and 
many other bits of info. Marsden is responsible for it, and welcomes
input and suggestions. The URL, password, and user name has been emailed
to everyone by Ed.

6. Other items; (a) Tony: there was a meeting of the IRAC team
yesterday. It has a new member: Bill Glaccum. There's good news: the
team finds that the latency problem even with saturated images will be
negligible, comparable to read noise. Glaccum estimates only two
electrons! LATENCY DOES NOT SEEM TO BE A PROBLEM.

(b) Ed: we need images for our Web page image library!

Adjourned early: 11:55 CST. Next telecon, TWO WEEKS HENCE.

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