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To be held August 18-20, 1999
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The Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) is rapidly moving toward a launch in December, 2001, with an anticipated working lifetime of five years or more. This very powerful resource for infrared astronomy, the last in the Great Observatories series, offers many unique advantages to Solar System science. Some 80 percent of the observing time on SIRTF will be madeavailable to the community of astronomers at large, and planetary astronomers can compete for an appropriate fraction of that time.
The SIRTF Project is conducting a series of workshops to acquaint astronomers with the capabilities of the facility and in order to prompt groups and individuals to begin formulating observing proposals.
A Solar System Working Group, chaired by Dale Cruikshank (NASA Ames) and Martha Hanner (JPL) has met to begin the definition of Solar System science projects and goals for SIRTF; the report of this group is posted on the SIRTF web page (see below).
To move this matter forward and to get the broad community of planetary scientists involved in planning their programs for SIRTF, a workshop is being organized for August, 1999. The Scientific Organizing Committee, consisting of Cruikshank and Hanner, Humberto Campins, Marina Fomenkova, Yvonne Pendleton, Ed Tedesco, Dana Backman, and Alan Stern, is organizing the scientific program, while local arrangements at the San Juan Institute are being handled by Janet Whitener and her team.
The workshop will consist of a presentation on the capabilities of the SIRTF instrumentation and facility, invited topical talks, and contributed presentations. We will publish an abstract booklet and a summary review of the workshop, but not a formal volume of presented papers.
Topics included in the workshop will be comets, interplanetary dust, the planets and their satellites, asteroids and other small bodies, and circumstellar debris disks related to planetary systems. SIRTF is poised to make fundamental contributions in all of these areas of planetary and stellar astronomy.
Details about the SIRTF mission, the telescope, and the three science instruments can be found on the SIRTF web page, http://ssc.caltech.edu/sirtf. To find the report of the Solar System Working Group, from the home page go to Proposal Kit, Documents, CTF White Papers.
Special note should be taken of the Legacy Science (LegSci) developed for SIRTF; these projects are expected to fill more than half of SIRTF's first year of observing, and are distinguished from the normal Guest Observer (GO) programs by the following criteria (1) large coherent science investigations, not reproducible by any reasonable number of combinations of smaller GO programs; (2) programs whose scientific data, upon archiving, are of general and lasting importance to the broad scientific community; and (3) data are non-proprietary, thereby enabling timely and effective opportunities for archival research and for follow-on observations.
The call for Legacy Science proposals will be issued in July, 2000, and the first call for Cycle 1 Guest Observer proposals will be issued in October, 2001.
More details about the Workshop will be posted on this and the SIRTF web sites as they become available.
Questions about the scientific program can be addressed
to:
Dale P. Cruikshank MS 245-6 NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000 Phone: +1(650)604-4244 e-mail: dale@ssa1.arc.nasa.gov
Details about local arrangements will be available, as
they are developed,
from:
Janet Whitener San Juan Capistrano Research Institute Phone 949-240-2010 e-mail: janetw@sji.org
Scientific presentations are (To be determined) invited on topics of the conference outlined above. Abstracts are limited to two pages. The Program Committee will use the abstracts to prepare a program of oral presentations consisting of both invited talks and contributed papers. Other presentations can be poster talks or exhibits. Abstracts will be printed in a booklet to be provided in the registration packet at the conference.
The registration fee has not yet been determined.
Expression-of-interest response As soon as possible! Second mailing, call for abstracts Abstract deadline Pre-registration deadline Third (final) mailing
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