The IOPW steering committee met on Monday, October 4, 2009 at the El Conquistador Resort , Fajardo, Puerto Rico.
Leigh Fletcher was introduced as the newest rotating memeber. A second rotating member was sought.
Reports from each of the sub-groups are reported below:
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Io
Franck Marchis, Chair
Io activity:
We had a workshop on Dec 2008 at SSL/UC-berkeley (Organizer: F. Marchis)
~30 people attended (most of the US-based Io community)
program, list of participants can be found here:
http://astro.berkeley.edu/~fmarchis/Science/Ioworkshop2008/index.htm
We dedicated some times to discuss the future of Io observations.
Key points are
1. Possible contribution of Io observations from Juno mission
2. need for more robust Io observation program from the ground (using AO)
3. A discovery mission concept dedicated to Io is in development Io Volcano Observer (PI. A. McEwen)
4. white paper from the Io community (leader: D. Williams) -> submitted a few weeks ago
Io observations
No dedicated Io observing program was submitted in 2007 - 2009 but Imke and I took advantage of our other observing to observe the satellite. This work (de Pater et al. 2009)was submitted and presented at the EPSC conference in Sep 2009.
Key results:
1. Pillan-2007 (detected from Keck in Aug 2007 by I. de Pater) bright
eruption similar in intensity to Pillan-1997 detected using Galileo scpacraft.
2. Loki-2009 (detected from Keck in July 2009 by I. de Pater, plus additional observations in Aug 16 (Marchis) and Sep 10 (de Pater)). We don't have the photometry ready yet but its brightness in Lp band is larger than 50 GW/sr/um. We detected also a counterpart of the
eruption at shorter wavelength (2 um) which indicates a high temperature volcanism (~1000 K).This is the first time that we detect a high-temperature eruption on Loki, that's why it is visible in sunlit direct imaging in K band.
Lellouch et al 2009 (EPSC) presented the first detected of Io atmosphere at 4 um using CRIRES, a high resolution spectrograph equipped with AO at VLT. Data were collected in July
2008. Pillan-2007 is still active with a brightness higher than Pillan-C9 (F=545 GW/sr). SO2
gas detected in absorption both in reflected and in volcanic emission.
I received reports from M. Wilkinson who monitored decametric radio emission (DAM) from Jupiter since 1984 at 20MHz of a reduced activity in 2009. He mentioned to me "that reduced volcanic activity could give rise to reduced ionospheric conductivity and perhaps reduced mass loading on field lines near Io and a depletion of the electron beams that drive the DAM
emission."
I also have reports from A. Wesley of the presence of an anomalous dark feature appearing
on the southern pole of Io in May 2009. I asked him to send me the images. more soon...
Future work:
Imke de Pater will lead a Gemini proposal to get a snapshot of Io activity in 2010 using multi observations collected in 5 filters with Gemini North AO system, a similar work that was done in Dec 2001 (Marchis et al 2005)
Imke and I submitted several proposals at Keck in imaging. Io is mentioned as a potential target for monitoring.
We are still discussing the possibility of implementing time domain observation at Keck (no success so far). We are trying to find a support from small telescopes equipped with 3-5um camera/bolometers to monitor Io continuously and trigger an ToO at VLT. I initiated such
program in 2005 (at 2um with Lick-3m AO) but we did not get enough Io obervations to trigger
the ToO at VLT.
Jupiter/Saturn Atmosphere Node
Ricardo Huseo, Chair
Assisted:
R. Achterberg, K. Baines, N. Barrado-Izagirre, I. de Pater, T. del Rio-Gaztelurrutia, L. Fletcher, P. Fry, H. B. Hammel, R. Hueso, R. Lebeau, F. Marchis, R. Moreno, G. S. Orton, S. Pérez-Hoyos, A. Sanchez-Lavega, K. Sayanagi, L. Sromovsky, M. Sussman, P. Yanamandra-Fisher and M. Wong
The Atmospheres Node celebrated a 2hr meeting over the 2009 DPS meeting.
The internal meeting was focused on the recent July 2009 impact on Jupiter. There were several short presentations by G.S. Orton, A. Sanchez-Lavega, L. Fletcher, P. Y-Fisher, F. Marchis, R. Hueso, S. Perez-Hoyos and I. de Pater of the different observations of the impact site in the next days and months after the impact. Coordination of next observing opportunities were discussed.
About half an hour of the meeting was devoted to other general atmospheric topics of Jupiter and Saturn. In particular G.S. Orton discussed the thermal properties and cloud variability in Oval BA befote and after the color change. K. Sayanagi presented details over his study of the Saturn's ribbon on Cassini ISS images. There was a discussion about the next BA-GRS crossing and observing opportunities.
The final part of the meeting was dedicated to coordination of publishing efforts related with the 2009 July impact.
Titan Sub-Discipline, Henry Roe
Our extended group has continued multi-telescope observations of Titan's methane weather. We have programs at IRTF to use SPeX in a service mode to grab a quick spectrum on as many nights as possible and a ToO program at Gemini (both North and South) to obtain snapshot resolved imaging on numerous nights. We also continue to work to develop small telescope photometric monitoring sites for filling in the temporal gaps and helping to trigger large telescope ToO's.
Aurora / Torus / Magnetosphere, John Clarke
The highlight of recent auroral observations of Jupiter and Saturn has been the publication of numerous results from an HST large observing program over 2007 / 2008. There are more than a dozen papers to date, and a special session at Fall 2008 AGU on outer planet aurora had 44 submissions. Much of this work is a combination of Cassini and New Horizons data sets in comparison with the HST auroral images.
For the outer planet environments, most new results have come from the continuing analysis of Cassini data at Saturn. A good overview of Cassini results was presented at the summer 2009 Magnetospheres of the Outer Planets meeting in Cologne:
http://www.geomet.uni-koeln.de/mop-2009/home/?L=2
Uranus / Neptune, Heidi Hammel
There have been continued observations of Uranus and Neptune with Keck, Hubble, and a number of other ground-based facilities, though a number of proposals have been unsuccessful in recent cycles/semesters. A steady stream of papers from the Uranus RPX is appearing, as well as a scattering of Neptune papers. (Glenn Orton adds his group's successful imaging of the stratosphere of Uranus.)
Laboratory Support, Paul Steffes
Paul Steffes described the Georgia Tech lab measurements webpage and also discussed the nature of lab measurements web pages maintained as part of PDS. Chris Russell described the IOPW website he is maintaining at UCLA. It was noted that there appear to be MANY IOPW websites (some for subdisciplines), and it was hard to identify which was most recent and functional. The Georgia Tech webpage is: