SOFIA DIscussion Meeting - 23 March 2011

Logistics

• Date: Wednesday March 23
• Time: 11:00am - 1pm ET (please bring lunch) OR 1:00 - 3:00pm ET
• Location NTC-400 (NTC Penthouse Meeting Room)
• Video IP:NTC Penthouse
• Audio: 1-517-466-2232 / 866-692-3582 Participant passcode: 1718193

Agenda

• 11:00 - 11:30 Summary of SOFIA and Instrument Possibilities (Eric)
• 11:30 - 12:00 Discussion of Science case and additional possibilities (All)
• 12:00 - 12:30 Strawman Instrument Specifications (All)
• 12:30 - 12:45 Summary and action items / date of next meeting (Richard)
• 12:45 - 13:00 AOB

Introduction

Eric reviewed specifications and status of SOFIA and existing instruments. Advantage of SOFIA over JWST is significally higher spectral resolution.

Attendees:

Eric Bryerton, Robin Pulliam, S.K. Pan, K.Saini, Skip Thacker, Morgan McLeod, John Webber, Matt Morgan, Rick Fisher, Art Lichtenberger, Sri Srikanth, Al Wootten, Marian Pospieskalski, RIcharrd Prestage, Tony Kerr, Rich Lacasse, Randy McCullough.

Phone / video:Gordon Coutts, Brian Glendenning, Ted Bergin, Gary Melnick, Mark Devlin

Introduction

Eric reviewed specifications and status of SOFIA and existing instruments. Advantage of SOFIA over JWST is significally higher spectral resolution.

Gary, Ted and Mark have extensive space/airborne/balloon expertise.

Does power budget include cooling power for equipment rack? Not clear.

Gary - must demonstrate demonstrably better performance than previous instruments, or be more flexible...

Gary: Be a discovery instrument (> HIFI, 1900GHz), superior performance to GREAT. OR, be a workhorse instrument, operate above ALMA. To be useful, must be frequency agile (several lines in a single flight). Follow up to ALMA, SMA or Herschel.

Ted: JPL will propose C+, OI array, MPIfR will propose the same thing. So, go for the CO ladder, but need much higher sensitivity than GREAT.

Mark CII spectral resolution on high-redshift galaxies. Look at Herschel selected regions. Can't do it from ground. Competitor would be CCAT or a balloon experiment (but doesn't have high pointing accuracy). To find redshift, just need an R of 500. To understand structure, need 1000. Herschel is the finder, SOFIA is the follow-up. Look at interesting sources which are confused for Herschel.

Rest frequency is 1900GHz. -. THz. Would need 300GHz coverage. Could use instrument to

-- RichardPrestage - 2011-04-05