Please remember to vote for the three new HEAD executive committee members. Ballots were sent out via email on 11/27/08 (Thanksgiving Day!) from Ann.Hornschemeier@xraydeep.org. Voting is open until December 30, 2008. As of 11/30/08 (mailing date for the newsletter), approximately 12% of the eligible membership has already voted. Thank you to those of you who voted so promptly! To the rest, please do not delay in sending in your vote!
There are several HEAD sessions at the January 2009 AAS in Long Beach. Please make sure to attend our HEAD business meeting on Wednesday, January 7 from 12:45pm - 1:45pm. We will announce the 2009 winners of the Rossi prize, the results of the HEAD election and discuss the HEAD budget at this meeting. On the same day (Wednesday, January 7) from 2PM-3:30PM there will be a HEAD session on "Signatures of Super Massive Black Holes" including black hole mergers and their electromagnetic signatures. Wednesday will wrap-up with this year's Rossi prize lecture by Steve Allen, Patrick Henry, Maxim Markevitch and Alexey Vikhlinin on "Galaxy Clusters in X-rays: Physics and Cosmology." The following day (Thursday, January 8) there will be a HEAD session from 10AM-11:30AM on TeV Astronomy covering results from Veritas, constraints on high-energy emission from pulsar wind nebulae and recent results on Mrk 421.
The next HEAD meeting will be March 1-4, 2010 at the Hilton Waikoloa Village on Hawaii's Big Island. Details will become available at the Conference Connection website: http://www.confcon.com/head2010/ Please start sending suggestions for keynote speakers to HEAD executive committee members and start considering special session proposal ideas. We will send out a solicitation for HEAD 2010 special session proposals sometime in early fall 2009. Please remember that there is a new HEAD dissertation prize which will be awarded for the first time at the 2010 HEAD meeting. Those who have received their degrees within 3 years prior to the HEAD meeting date, in this case since March 1, 2007, are eligible for the prize. A detailed announcement with instructions will be sent out during Fall 2009. The deadline will likely be in EARLY January 2010 , The winner of the prize will receive a certificate, a cash award of $1000, and an invitation to give a 30-minute invited talk at the HEAD Meeting. HEAD will waive the meeting registration fee for the winner and cover up to $1500 of the winner's travel expenses to attend the meeting.
All HEAD members must maintain an up-to-date email address with the AAS to ensure that society email (including ballots for elections) reaches them. To change your email address with the AAS please visit http://www.aas.org and follow the member log-in links.
The membership of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey Committee (ASTRO2010) has just been announced, and careful readers may have noticed that HEAD is well-represented. Five of the 23 members are former officers of HEAD, including the Committee Chair, Roger Blandford (HEAD Chair 2004-05, Vice-Chair 2002-03, Exec Committee 1982-83), Lars Bildsten (EC 2000-01), Fiona Harrison (EC 2004-05), Claire Max (EC 1975-76), and Dan McCammon (EC 1997-98). Fermi (formerly GLAST) Project Scientist Steve Ritz brings yet more high-energy astrophysics expertise to the panel.
We still do not know the organization or membership of the sub-committees, but this will undoubtedly be a major topic for discussion (and perhaps decision) at the committee's first meeting on December 5-6. So we may know more at the January AAS meeting, where the "launch" of the Survey will take place. This will essentially be the first of many "town hall" meetings held by the Survey.
I hope that many of you will make it to the January meeting, which is co-sponsored by HEAD. In addition to the customary HEAD sessions, Rossi Prize lecture and HEAD business meeting (see the Editor's notes from the Secretary-Treasurer above ), there will be many other events that should be of special interest to the high-energy community. To mention just a few: Steve Ritz will report on the first 6 months of Fermi; Heinemann Prize winner Andy Fabian will discuss "Black Holes at Work"; there will be a LISA "talent show"; and special sessions will focus on the Galactic Center and future X-ray observatories. See you in Long Beach!
Report from NASA HQ
Astrophysics Division
A. New Appointments at HQ
The last several months saw a large flux in the scientists serving under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) in the Astrophysics Division. Alan Smale returned to NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center as the HEASARC new director, Frank (Rick) Harnden retired after several years as a Discipline and Program Scientist working on both the Fermi (formerly known as GLAST) and the SWIFT missions.
Pamela Marcum returned to her position at Texas Christian University (TCU). To fill this void, there are a lot of new faces in the Division.
Patricia (Padi) Boyd from NASA/GSFC is now the Program Scientist for the Kepler mission due to be launched soon, Richard Griffith from Carnegie Mellon is the new program scientist for JDEM, and Ilana Harrus (Johns Hopkins University) is the new Program Scientist for Fermi, and the new Program scientist and Program executive for both Swift and RXTE. She is also the new Press Point of Contact for the Division.
Thierry Lanz (University of Maryland) and Mario Perez (Los Alamos National Laboratory) have also begun assignments in the Division, and will be working primarily on projects in the longer wavelength disciplines.
B. Continuing Resolution to March 06, 2009
We are operating under a Continuing Resolution (CR) extending to March 6 of next year. In consequence, we have received a little more than 43% of our total budget. This will require us to selectively provide funding on a case-by-case basis starting with those efforts that have a time criticality associated with them (e.g., pending balloon flight).
C.Update on the Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences
A new edition of the ROSES will be released in February 2009.
It will contain all the information relevant to the upcoming proposals deadlines. Up-to-date information on proposals deadline can be accessed at:
http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/
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4. HEAD in the News - Megan Watzke
During this period, the big newsmakers for high-energy astrophysics came from two (different) supernovas and one new telescope. On May 14th, NASA held a phone-in press conference, known as a "media teleconference," to discuss G1.9+0.3. This discovery of the youngest supernova in the Milky Way got widespread coverage including the New York Times, Washington Post, and the national NBC evening news. Just a week later, another NASA media teleconference was held on supernova 2008D, the first supernova astronomers were able to observe as it exploded. Once again, this story was picked up by media across the world in print, broadcast and web-based outlets. Another major story in high-energy astrophysics was, of course, the successful launch and start of science operations for GLAST, now Fermi. After generating news prior to launch, Fermi got much-deserved attention for its new name and first science results that were announced during a NASA media teleconference on August 26th. If any HEAD members are interested in the specific details of this coverage, please contact Megan Watzke.
While those were the biggest high-energy stories of the past half-year, they were by no means the only ones. Here's a sample of some of the other HEAD stories making news:
October 30, 2008 (Chandra), "Searching for Primordial Antimatter"
http://www.chandra.harvard.edu/press/08_releases/press_103008.html
October 15, 2008 (RXTE), "Two Black Holes Teach Astronomers a Lesson"
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/blackhole_lesson.html
September 23, 2008 (WMAP), "Scientists Detect Cosmic 'Dark Flow' Across Billions of Light Years"
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2008/dark_flow.html
September 22, 2008 (Swift), "NASA Satellite Sees the Oldest-Ever Gamma-ray Burst from the Edge of the Visible Universe"
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2008/farthest_grb.html
August 26, 2008 (Fermi), "NASA Renames Observatory for Fermi, Reveals Entire Gamma-Ray Sky"
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2008/glast_renamed.html
July 26, 2008 (Chandra), "A New Way to Weigh Black Holes"
http://www.chandra.harvard.edu/press/08_releases/press_071608.html
May 21, 2008 (Swift), "NASA's Swift Satellite Catches First Supernova in the Act of Exploding"
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2008/swift_supernova.html
May 14, 2008 (Chandra), "Discovery of Most Recent Supernova in Our Galaxy"
http://www.chandra.harvard.edu/press/08_releases/press_051408.html
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5. Chandra X-ray Observatory Operations Report - Roger Brissenden (SAO) and
Martin Weisskopf (MSFC)
Chandra successfully completed 9 years of science operations in July
and the spacecraft and science instruments continue to operate
well. The spacecraft passed through the 2008 summer eclipse season in
June/July with expected power and thermal performance. Chandra did
experience two anomalies during the last 6 months when different
electronics units reset in August and October, apparently due to
single event upsets. The spacecraft transitioned to normal sun mode in
both cases and there was no indication of a hardware problem. The
Flight Operations Team recovered the spacecraft to normal operations
rapidly in both cases and only one orbit (2 days) of observations was lost due
to each anomaly.
The ACIS flight software was updated on Oct 1 but ACIS also
experienced an anomalous reset on Oct 5 during a continuous clocking
mode observation. While there is no indication that the reset was
related to the new software, the team decided to revert to the prior
version and try to reproduce the reset on the ACIS engineering unit.
Chandra's overall observing efficiency has remained close to optimal since May
and the mission planning team responded to four fast-turnaround targets of
opportunity during the period.
The science processing, archiving and distribution of data continued
smoothly with the time from observation to release of data to
observers remaining at about a day. The processing of data for the
Chandra Source Catalog began on September 15; the initial data are
available at http://cxc.harvard.edu/csc/ .
The first complete release
of the catalog is expected in January.
The Chandra Cycle 10 Peer Review was held in June and the results released
shortly thereafter. The Cycle 11 Call for Proposals will be released on
December 15, 2008 with proposals due in March.
As announced by NASA HQ, the Chandra Fellows program has been combined
with the Fermi Fellows program and a number of new fellowships to form
the Einstein Fellows Program. The CXC will be administering the
program and issued the first call for the proposals in August for
proposals due on November 7 ( http://cxc.harvard.edu/fellows/ )). Over
150 proposals were received for this first Einstein call.
The Chandra Press Office has been very productive with 8 press releases and 17
image releases issued since May. For a full listing, see
http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/ .
The Ten Years of Science with Chandra symposium is being planned for
September 2009. This very special symposium will be held in Boston,
Massachusetts, USA from Tuesday, 22 September through Friday, 25
September 2009. Although clearly emphasizing Chandra results, research
results from all the observatories are welcomed. Please plan on
joining us for an exciting celebration of 10 years of science
with this remarkable Great Observatory. We plan on publishing a
proceedings for the symposium. Finally, the Chandra Calibration Workshop
will also be held in this time frame, probably on Monday September 21,
2009
