As a member of the MIPSGAL team, I'd like to point out that all the data used for the huge image has been public since it was processed. Whilst standard observing programs have a proprietary period of 1 yr (so the PI can get the science done that he designed the observations around), the Legacy programs such as GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL has a zero proprietary period. Legacy programs are selected on their ability to influence astronomy as a whole and provide data which may have additional uses (like I'm actually doing a secondary asteroid survey based on large quantity of data in galactic plane surveys).
Actually the SHIT poster was born out of the grad play. And BLT posters for the plat have been made for the grad play something like 5-ish years ago (god I'm dating myself).
All hail the mighty observers. We're pointing Spitzer at this as well, except we're going to be using a previously untested model with the spectrograph- continuous read mode. We're hoping to get a good time series of spectra. Of course I don't even want to think about how much data we're going to have to dump.
Of course the weather in Tucson is gonna suck horribly that night so I highly doubt that Kitt Peak will get anything since that's about the beginning of monsoon season (I should know, I've been rained out during that month more times than I care to admit)
We need to get the spacecraft down to 5 degrees Kelvin. Being in an Earth trailing orbit Spitzer gets warm from absorbed solar incident light as well as from solar flares (of all things). Passive cooling only gets us down to 10 degrees cooling which still isn't quite cold enough for quality images at the longer wavelengths.
Actually 2M1207 is not a confirmed planetary candidate. While it is around another "star" (a brown dwarf) it seems to fall into the category of brown dwarf as well, making this a binary star system, not a star-planet system.
Any possible planet X would be far enough away that:
1) it couldn't reflect much solar incident light, hence would be pratically invisible in the optical
2) for a thermal measurement you'd need the mid IR which you cannot do with Hubble as contamination from Earth is too high and Hubble is not actively cooled. To get a mid IR instrument on there with usable data you would have to cool the entire telescope assembly as we do with Spitzer.
As someone who works who runs the Spitzer Helpdesk-
Thank you for reading the documentation!
And I'm a bit dissappointed people still haven't heard of us.
We launched in August 2003 and have been in science operations since December 2003. We have an approximately 5 year operational life time though the IRAC instrument may still be useable with only passive cooling once we run out of cryogen.
While clouds are significants sources of albedo, the Earth would still not appear very "hot" as our atmosphere is general is quite cool.
A planned instrument for a Mars orbiter will likely contain a spectrograph which will be used to look back at Earth to give astrobiologists an idea what the atmospheres of extrasolar planets with life may look like from a distance.
Yes Spitzer has been in science operations for over a year now. These detections were made with the two imagers- IRAC and MIPS. IRAC is the shorter wavelength camera (the observations were done at 8 microns) and MIPS the longer wavelength camera (observations done at 24 microns).
Both planets are approximate 1000 degrees Kelvin and are Jupiter class with respect to mass.HD 209458b is 0.68 times the mass of Jupiter and has a radius about 1.35 times Jupiter's. The second planet- TrES1 has a mass equal to 0.76 Jupiter masses and is 1.04 times the radius of Jupiter.
(and I do work for Spitzer and knew about these discoveries about 2 months ago when they first came into our Helpdesk which i run)
Given that I work for Spitzer. ..yes. Saturn is on the list of bright sources that will saturate the detectors except possibly short exposures in high resolution mode of IRS. Given that we've accidentally slewed the telescope across it though and left latents, we probably won't be observing it any time soon.
As I used to be out in AZ and am and astronomer I'll take a quick hack:
2. Large telescope = small field. The f/15 field of view is 8 x 4 arcminutes
3. 0.3-400 microns. Accounting for atmospheric seeing. . well that's questionable, but close to that big of a span (I'm not ready to fight atmospheric windows over collecting area today)
4. The same absorption lines we see in all spectra. That's why we takes standards and off source spectra as well with any telescope.
6.Using the 90 inch I've done hour integrations. And I'd like to correct your coment about the Ultra Deep Field- it was not 150 straight orbits of time, but images coadded to reproduce a total exposure time of 150 orbits.
7. Depends on the wavelength. In the blue the moon is also a real bitch.
Both our Computer Support group and my group (Astronomer Support) use the AIM Helpdesk System by Applied Innovation Management.
It has its own quirks. Most of our problems have been with text length in emails we recieve to the Helpdesk from the outside world (the version of pSQL we have is so old it only allows fields to be 8 kb long). For the computer support group it works great- it's nice to be a user and check the status of my "tickets" in the system and to be able to search and see if other folks have had similar problems of procurement requests!
than the people who declare we're all going to die after only a nights worth of orbit data (And yes I am an astronomer dammit!). There are too many people trying to do sloppy science by deriving an orbit after only a night's worth of data and then send out a press release (*cough* University of Pisa *cough*)
It makes us look bad that they declare we're all going to die and then later late week after they've gotten more data and re-crunch the numbers have to come back and say "Ohh, yeah, please ignore what we just said"
This instrument won't tell us anything about water on Mars in the way in which you're thinking. The spectra of Earth is it's atmospheric spectra. We already know about the atmospheric spectra of Mars from ground based observations and other space missions and we know that the bulk of the water we infer to be there from surface geology is NOT trapped in the atmosphere.
At this point in order to find water we need a better gamma ray spectrometer (not optical and IR), but current analysis shows that there isn't enough carbon dioxide on Mars to have caused what water ice there is now to melt.
This guy seems to leave out other sources of publishing such as Plan 9. I just recently shelled out over $100 for copies of Sluggy Freelance for my boyfriend's upcoming birthday. They seem to work directly with the artists and cut them a fairly significant fraction of the proce (mind you that's provided the readers buy directly from Plan 9 and not Amazon).
First off the space.com story alternated between calling the galaxy Arp 229 and Arp 299 which totally confused my astronomer self.
BUT. ..Arp 299 is one of the galaxies calssified as a starburst galaxy, meaning we see lots of star formation going on in Arp 299. People saw how much star formation with ISO and we'll be looking at it with SIRTF after we launch. It's thought that supernovae can trigger star formation by the shocks from the explosion disturbing the gas clouds and making them unstable. Of course the multiwavelength data is needed to test this theory and this radio data combined with the optical and infrared will be a good first start. . . .
*sigh* Spiral= bad.
holman orbit=elliptical= lowest energy orbit= happy engineers because you don't have to waste all your mass on fuel. And for an elliptical orbit you'd still want to go at about the time Mars is closest- you want to treat both Mars and Earth as the focii for the ellipse.
I don't think the big profs count the 2.2 and 3.6 meter telescopes as a top tier toy. As an undergrad at Arizona I had regular access to a 2.3 meter and a 2.4 meter telescope on Kitt Peak immediately after my freshman year. Part of this was due to having a nice advisor and some of it was because everyone else was trying to use bigger telescopes like the MMT and Magellan.
Seeing as this guy is at Hawaii I'm betting the fights over the 2 to 3 meter class telescopes is no where near the fights people would get into over the much bigger (10 meter class) WM Keck telescopes
And after only an undergrad degree I have a cushy job in astronomy at the SIRTF Science Center that pays more than some astro postdocs. . . .
Back in my day (which wasn't that long ago) Apple IIes were the way to go. In elementary school we were introduced to basic programming using Logo and Logo Writer in which commands could be written in a programming buffer which could draw cool designs and play little songs when you compiled your mini-code on the Logo command line.
In high school ('96), we had a networked set of Apple IIe's (which I re-networked the next year) that were mainly used for labs- both for plotting data and in some cases, learning to program in basic. Our basic programs were labs where we would run quick projectile motion models with varying height parameters (launching something off a cliff as an example) and by adding wind resistance. The labs showed that most of us were really bad at estimating how far objects would travel in non-perfect (ie non-vacuum) conditions. Last I heard the physics lab is still using those machines though the teacher is retiring at the end of the year. . . .
Our Launch date is currently April 18th at something like 4:30 EDT. It was April 15th at the same time but a military satellite took higher precedence over us and was launched last Friday.
Our nominal launch window is April 15th through about May 9th. The next things to get launched are the Mars probes. We're supposed to be the "test" case of the Delta II Heavy for the Mars probes but it'll be a little too late to change things for them if we have rocket problems.
Our webpage is http://sirtf.caltech.edu for the general public and http://sirtf.caltech.edu/SSC for the scientists.
We're pretty small- 80 cm in diameter. We can essentially fit the whole space craft assembly in the telescope tube for Hubble. We have three instruments- 2 cameras and a spectrograph. IRAC is the InfraRed Array Camera and observes at 3.6,4.5, 5.8 and 8.0 microns. The other imager, MIPS, the Mid Infrared Photometer for SIRTF observes at 24, 50 and 160 microns. It can also do "rough" spectroscopy in Spectral Energy Distribution Mode but we don't anticipate making that available until about the 2nd year. The Spectrograph is named IRS (InfraRed Spectrograph) and observes from 5 to 40 microns. Our required mission life time is about 2.5 years but we anticipate that we will be operating for over 5 years (it is directly dependent on how much cryogen we have). After we run out of cryogen we can still operate IRAC but MIPS and IRS will have problems because of the warmth of the telescope. Oh and one last detail- we're in an earth trailing orbit so unlike Hubble we can't send people up to fix things or install new instruments.
I was with Mark (Wagner) and Sumner (Starrfield) when we got the spectra. ..now I'm going to be really pissed if I'm not on the paper since I was the one taking the spectra. . .
But anyhow. ..the spectra is really interesting, there are P Cygni profiles for every emission line in the spectra (P Cygni's look like half a gaussian in emission with a sharp cutoff to be half a gaussian in absorption). This object was actually noticed by people looking at variable stars and then was picked up by some other folks in Arizona which showed the light echos even in the relatively low resolution images we got on the ground compared to our HST ACS images.
Re:Do NOT stand in front of one, though....
on
Potato Bazookas
·
· Score: 1
Yo Fish you forgot that not only did we have fast moving potato but we often had flaming potato in several chunks!
Dennis doesn't need a reason to laugh at me (hmm almost blonde, klutzy girlfriend of Kris. ..not much need to try hard to make fun of me). Worse is that Mark (Wagner) and I always forget the tapes- I leave the tapes in town but normally he forgets the tapes at the 'scope. When did Jill get a new spiffy linux box? I didn't think she had one last month when I was back there.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the MIPSGAL website has the composite image in the Google Maps interface. Here's our shiny
As a member of the MIPSGAL team, I'd like to point out that all the data used for the huge image has been public since it was processed. Whilst standard observing programs have a proprietary period of 1 yr (so the PI can get the science done that he designed the observations around), the Legacy programs such as GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL has a zero proprietary period. Legacy programs are selected on their ability to influence astronomy as a whole and provide data which may have additional uses (like I'm actually doing a secondary asteroid survey based on large quantity of data in galactic plane surveys).
Actually the SHIT poster was born out of the grad play. And BLT posters for the plat have been made for the grad play something like 5-ish years ago (god I'm dating myself).
*pokes*
All hail the mighty observers. We're pointing Spitzer at this as well, except we're going to be using a previously untested model with the spectrograph- continuous read mode. We're hoping to get a good time series of spectra. Of course I don't even want to think about how much data we're going to have to dump.
Of course the weather in Tucson is gonna suck horribly that night so I highly doubt that Kitt Peak will get anything since that's about the beginning of monsoon season (I should know, I've been rained out during that month more times than I care to admit)
We need to get the spacecraft down to 5 degrees Kelvin. Being in an Earth trailing orbit Spitzer gets warm from absorbed solar incident light as well as from solar flares (of all things). Passive cooling only gets us down to 10 degrees cooling which still isn't quite cold enough for quality images at the longer wavelengths.
Actually 2M1207 is not a confirmed planetary candidate. While it is around another "star" (a brown dwarf) it seems to fall into the category of brown dwarf as well, making this a binary star system, not a star-planet system.
No Hubble wouldn't work.
Any possible planet X would be far enough away that:
1) it couldn't reflect much solar incident light, hence would be pratically invisible in the optical
2) for a thermal measurement you'd need the mid IR which you cannot do with Hubble as contamination from Earth is too high and Hubble is not actively cooled. To get a mid IR instrument on there with usable data you would have to cool the entire telescope assembly as we do with Spitzer.
As someone who works who runs the Spitzer Helpdesk-
Thank you for reading the documentation!
And I'm a bit dissappointed people still haven't heard of us.
We launched in August 2003 and have been in science operations since December 2003. We have an approximately 5 year operational life time though the IRAC instrument may still be useable with only passive cooling once we run out of cryogen.
While clouds are significants sources of albedo, the Earth would still not appear very "hot" as our atmosphere is general is quite cool. A planned instrument for a Mars orbiter will likely contain a spectrograph which will be used to look back at Earth to give astrobiologists an idea what the atmospheres of extrasolar planets with life may look like from a distance.
Yes Spitzer has been in science operations for over a year now. These detections were made with the two imagers- IRAC and MIPS. IRAC is the shorter wavelength camera (the observations were done at 8 microns) and MIPS the longer wavelength camera (observations done at 24 microns). Both planets are approximate 1000 degrees Kelvin and are Jupiter class with respect to mass.HD 209458b is 0.68 times the mass of Jupiter and has a radius about 1.35 times Jupiter's. The second planet- TrES1 has a mass equal to 0.76 Jupiter masses and is 1.04 times the radius of Jupiter. (and I do work for Spitzer and knew about these discoveries about 2 months ago when they first came into our Helpdesk which i run)
Given that I work for Spitzer. . .yes. Saturn is on the list of bright sources that will saturate the detectors except possibly short exposures in high resolution mode of IRS. Given that we've accidentally slewed the telescope across it though and left latents, we probably won't be observing it any time soon.
As I used to be out in AZ and am and astronomer I'll take a quick hack: 2. Large telescope = small field. The f/15 field of view is 8 x 4 arcminutes 3. 0.3-400 microns. Accounting for atmospheric seeing. . well that's questionable, but close to that big of a span (I'm not ready to fight atmospheric windows over collecting area today) 4. The same absorption lines we see in all spectra. That's why we takes standards and off source spectra as well with any telescope. 6.Using the 90 inch I've done hour integrations. And I'd like to correct your coment about the Ultra Deep Field- it was not 150 straight orbits of time, but images coadded to reproduce a total exposure time of 150 orbits. 7. Depends on the wavelength. In the blue the moon is also a real bitch.
Both our Computer Support group and my group (Astronomer Support) use the AIM Helpdesk System by Applied Innovation Management. It has its own quirks. Most of our problems have been with text length in emails we recieve to the Helpdesk from the outside world (the version of pSQL we have is so old it only allows fields to be 8 kb long). For the computer support group it works great- it's nice to be a user and check the status of my "tickets" in the system and to be able to search and see if other folks have had similar problems of procurement requests!
than the people who declare we're all going to die after only a nights worth of orbit data (And yes I am an astronomer dammit!). There are too many people trying to do sloppy science by deriving an orbit after only a night's worth of data and then send out a press release (*cough* University of Pisa *cough*)
It makes us look bad that they declare we're all going to die and then later late week after they've gotten more data and re-crunch the numbers have to come back and say "Ohh, yeah, please ignore what we just said"
This instrument won't tell us anything about water on Mars in the way in which you're thinking. The spectra of Earth is it's atmospheric spectra. We already know about the atmospheric spectra of Mars from ground based observations and other space missions and we know that the bulk of the water we infer to be there from surface geology is NOT trapped in the atmosphere. At this point in order to find water we need a better gamma ray spectrometer (not optical and IR), but current analysis shows that there isn't enough carbon dioxide on Mars to have caused what water ice there is now to melt.
This guy seems to leave out other sources of publishing such as Plan 9. I just recently shelled out over $100 for copies of Sluggy Freelance for my boyfriend's upcoming birthday. They seem to work directly with the artists and cut them a fairly significant fraction of the proce (mind you that's provided the readers buy directly from Plan 9 and not Amazon).
First off the space.com story alternated between calling the galaxy Arp 229 and Arp 299 which totally confused my astronomer self.
.Arp 299 is one of the galaxies calssified as a starburst galaxy, meaning we see lots of star formation going on in Arp 299. People saw how much star formation with ISO and we'll be looking at it with SIRTF after we launch. It's thought that supernovae can trigger star formation by the shocks from the explosion disturbing the gas clouds and making them unstable. Of course the multiwavelength data is needed to test this theory and this radio data combined with the optical and infrared will be a good first start. . . .
BUT. .
*sigh* Spiral= bad.
holman orbit=elliptical= lowest energy orbit= happy engineers because you don't have to waste all your mass on fuel. And for an elliptical orbit you'd still want to go at about the time Mars is closest- you want to treat both Mars and Earth as the focii for the ellipse.
I don't think the big profs count the 2.2 and 3.6 meter telescopes as a top tier toy. As an undergrad at Arizona I had regular access to a 2.3 meter and a 2.4 meter telescope on Kitt Peak immediately after my freshman year. Part of this was due to having a nice advisor and some of it was because everyone else was trying to use bigger telescopes like the MMT and Magellan.
Seeing as this guy is at Hawaii I'm betting the fights over the 2 to 3 meter class telescopes is no where near the fights people would get into over the much bigger (10 meter class) WM Keck telescopes
And after only an undergrad degree I have a cushy job in astronomy at the SIRTF Science Center that pays more than some astro postdocs. . . .
Back in my day (which wasn't that long ago) Apple IIes were the way to go. In elementary school we were introduced to basic programming using Logo and Logo Writer in which commands could be written in a programming buffer which could draw cool designs and play little songs when you compiled your mini-code on the Logo command line.
In high school ('96), we had a networked set of Apple IIe's (which I re-networked the next year) that were mainly used for labs- both for plotting data and in some cases, learning to program in basic. Our basic programs were labs where we would run quick projectile motion models with varying height parameters (launching something off a cliff as an example) and by adding wind resistance. The labs showed that most of us were really bad at estimating how far objects would travel in non-perfect (ie non-vacuum) conditions. Last I heard the physics lab is still using those machines though the teacher is retiring at the end of the year. . . .
So what you're telling me is that the next earthquake has a possiblity of knocking out all of the Valley girls. . .hmmm I'm all for this fault ;)
Our Launch date is currently April 18th at something like 4:30 EDT. It was April 15th at the same time but a military satellite took higher precedence over us and was launched last Friday.
Our nominal launch window is April 15th through about May 9th. The next things to get launched are the Mars probes. We're supposed to be the "test" case of the Delta II Heavy for the Mars probes but it'll be a little too late to change things for them if we have rocket problems.
Our webpage is http://sirtf.caltech.edu for the general public and http://sirtf.caltech.edu/SSC for the scientists.
We're pretty small- 80 cm in diameter. We can essentially fit the whole space craft assembly in the telescope tube for Hubble. We have three instruments- 2 cameras and a spectrograph. IRAC is the InfraRed Array Camera and observes at 3.6,4.5, 5.8 and 8.0 microns. The other imager, MIPS, the Mid Infrared Photometer for SIRTF observes at 24, 50 and 160 microns. It can also do "rough" spectroscopy in Spectral Energy Distribution Mode but we don't anticipate making that available until about the 2nd year. The Spectrograph is named IRS (InfraRed Spectrograph) and observes from 5 to 40 microns. Our required mission life time is about 2.5 years but we anticipate that we will be operating for over 5 years (it is directly dependent on how much cryogen we have). After we run out of cryogen we can still operate IRAC but MIPS and IRS will have problems because of the warmth of the telescope. Oh and one last detail- we're in an earth trailing orbit so unlike Hubble we can't send people up to fix things or install new instruments.
I was with Mark (Wagner) and Sumner (Starrfield) when we got the spectra. . .now I'm going to be really pissed if I'm not on the paper since I was the one taking the spectra. . .
But anyhow. . .the spectra is really interesting, there are P Cygni profiles for every emission line in the spectra (P Cygni's look like half a gaussian in emission with a sharp cutoff to be half a gaussian in absorption). This object was actually noticed by people looking at variable stars and then was picked up by some other folks in Arizona which showed the light echos even in the relatively low resolution images we got on the ground compared to our HST ACS images.
Yo Fish you forgot that not only did we have fast moving potato but we often had flaming potato in several chunks!
Dennis doesn't need a reason to laugh at me (hmm almost blonde, klutzy girlfriend of Kris. . .not much need to try hard to make fun of me). Worse is that Mark (Wagner) and I always forget the tapes- I leave the tapes in town but normally he forgets the tapes at the 'scope. When did Jill get a new spiffy linux box? I didn't think she had one last month when I was back there.