Minutes of telecon of 27 Nov 2001

March meeting in Madison: please reserve March 21/22 (Thursday, Friday)!

Next telecon: Dec. 11 (in 2 weeks)

Present: Present: Babler, Benjamin, Churchwell, Clemens, Dickey, Indebetouw, Jackson, Kobulnicky, Marston, Mathis, Meade, Watson, Whitney, Wolfire

I. Budget (EBC): there are delays in releasing funds. If Research Administration people at any institution are nervous about availability of funding, have them call Elizabeth Chen (JPL) for reassurance. The 4-year budgets have been released. We have $80K for capital items, but only $30K for next year. The rest is for the following year. Institutions should submit budgets to Michael Bicay (SSC), probably before Dec. 31, using any suitable form.

II. Area covered by simulation (BW): M. Cohen was asked to use his SKY program for predictions in the 2 x 2 degree patch centered on l = +19 deg (+/- 1 deg, of course). 2MASS point source data are available. Simulations will include instrumental effects (program by Matt Ashby, to be released on this day?).

III. Task schedule for preparing for review of May 2002: see outline supplied by Whitney, but not openable by several members of team. Items were discussed very briefly in turn. These minutes will refer to the items on this outline by their number.

3. b. iv: John Dickey is added to the ISM team (Benjamin, Lazarian, Mathis)

4. Calibration will include early A dwarfs, but it is not clear that we should do it in addition to the SSC calibration. If we do our own calibration, we would need several stars per AOR for making the mosiacing smooth. The relative photometric accuracy SSC hopes for is 2%; the expected absolute accuracy varies (esp. with Zodiacal light background), but is perhaps 10%. The SSC calibration is performed next-to-last in their pipeline sequence. The SSC calibrating observations will be distributed throughout each IRAC campaign. The IRAC test have shown the camera to be very stable.

6. Pipeline issues: will be discussed next telecon, since Mike Wolff is at a meeting during this one.

We **must** determine the quality of data we require for performing the various science items we have identified! Each team listed in Sec. 3b ("Reliability and Completeness; science break points") should be preparing estimates of the tolerable errors appropriate for its science. The end of the year is a reasonable time for having this work done.

Banding: Remy said that he is concerned that it may be really bothersome, perhaps affecting 10 - 15% of pixels in crowded fields, but his information seems rather vague. Marston will find current status of banding corrections and will email Ed and Remy.

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