EPOXI Mission News Options

[stevesliva]

Looks like the Deep Impact list has been revived. Posting here for others to get back on board:

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EPOXI E-News #1 May 2008
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WELCOME BACK!

Did you know that the Deep Impact Flyby Spacecraft has a new assignment? The
EPOXI mission combines two exciting science investigations in an entirely
new mission that re-uses the Deep Impact spacecraft. The Extrasolar Planet
Observation and Characterization (EPOCh) investigation will observe stars
that have known transiting giant planets. The Deep Impact Extended
Investigation (DIXI) of comets observes comet 103P/Hartley 2 during a close
flyby in October 2010.

The education and public outreach team decided to get back in touch with our
Deep Impact friends and begin sending out newsletters again to keep you
informed of these two exciting investigations! During the two years since
our last newsletter for Deep Impact, the science team has stayed busy
continuing to do more analysis on the data collected in July 2005. The
science team also proposed and was awarded an extended mission teaming up
with a group from Goddard Space Flight Center.
EPOXI website: http://epoxi.umd.edu/
Mission Overview: http://epoxi.umd.edu/1mission/index.shtml
Press Releases: http://epoxi.umd.edu/7press/index.shtml
DI Results: http://deepimpact.umd.edu/results/

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MISSION STATUS

Dr. Deming, Principal Investigator (PI) for the EPOCh portion of the
mission, sends us the latest mission status report in which he tells us
about the current observing target GJ436. “This is an exciting time for
EPOCh, as we search for an exo-Earth orbiting a stellar neighbor of our
Sun!” reports Dr Deming. He also talks about the plans to observe a very
special planet in late May and early June.

Read his status report as well as past reports from other team members at
http://epoxi.umd.edu/1mission/status.shtml

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EPOCh TARGETS

The EPOCh component of the EPOXI mission will carefully study a small number
of stars in order to learn more about planets that we know are orbiting
those stars by watching the planets as they transit (cross in front of) the
star. EPOCh will also search for clues to other planets that might be
orbiting the same stars.

Read more about the EPOCh science targets to find out which stars are being
observed.
http://epoxi.umd.edu/2science/targets.shtml

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PLANET QUEST

Are we alone?
For centuries, human beings have pondered this question. Medieval scholars
speculated that other worlds must exist and that some would harbor other
forms of life. In our time, advances in science and technology have brought
us to the threshold of finding an answer to this timeless question.
The recent discovery of numerous planets around stars other than the sun
confirms that our solar system is not unique. Indeed, these "exoplanets"
appear to be common in our galactic neighborhood.
The EPOCh investigation is part of a larger family of missions studying
extrasolar planets. Learn more at the Jet Propulsion Lab Planet Quest Web site.
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm

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OBSERVING CHALLENGE

The transits that will be studied for EPOCh are extremely difficult to
observe because the change in brightness is very small and requires high
precision photometry that can be accomplished with instruments on the Deep
Impact spacecraft. Observers on Earth can still take a look at the stars in
the night time sky. The selected stars are also pretty dim because we don’t
want them to saturate or over expose the spacecraft instruments but they are
bright enough to be visible in amateur telescopes if the sky conditions are
good and the skies are dark.

Like people, stars have multiple identifiers. EPOCh’s first target was a
star labeled as HAT-P-4 by the scientists observing it. They made their own
list of target stars so that was their shorthand name. But HAT-P-4 has
numerous other names which are more useful in identifying it in other databases.
HAT-P-4 = SAO 64638 = TYC 2569-1599-1 is a magnitude 11, G-class star
located in the constellation Boötes.
Chart: http://epoxi.umd.edu/2science/challenge.shtml

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SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

Please forward this e-mail to others interested in NASA missions. New
subscribers may join the EPOXI Mission e-news mailing list on our website
at: http://epoxi.umd.edu/6outreach/newsletter.shtml

[Rich]

So I just got a blessing from the Ethics office. Attached is the presentation on EPOCh observations I gave at the IEEE conference in Big Sky. Feel free to bug me with questions. I'm continuing to research the legal aspects of posting the paper here too. Stay tuned!

 EPOCh_IEEE_Presentation_umsf.pdf ( 963.67K ) Number of downloads: 904


~Rich

[dmuller]

Dear Rich,

Daniel, the SPICE kernel you have is slightly out of date. Your version was generated before TCM-14 without the TCM-14 burn. You want to be using spk_drm224_Burn-full.bin That's the latest and greatest o.d. solution.

Thanks so much for the clarification. I will incorporate the file into the next data update.

Where are you getting these by the way? Are they public?

Yes the SPICE kernels are public and for most missions they can be found at http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/
EPOXI, still under the Deep Impact name, is listed under the Comet and Asteroid missions at http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/data_comet.html
The Horizons system at http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons also runs on SPICE kernels but occasionally it is not updated. At the moment it seems to use

CODE

Trajectory Name               Start UTC             Stop UTC
----------------------------- --------------------  --------------------
[...]
drm220_withTCM12-full         2008 APR 18 09:00:00  2008 DEC 09 00:00:00
  (103P/Hartley 2 soln.: #49)
drm223_with_tcms-full         2008 DEC 09 00:00:00  2012 JAN 31 00:00:00
epoxi_2008-2019.090217        2012 JAN 31 00:00:00  2019 JAN 01 00:00:00

I sent an e-mail to the webmaster for space.jpl.nasa.gov and asked him to add EPOXI. He hasn't gotten back to me, but I hope we'll get EPOXI in there.

Thanks.

If you wish to include timeline events, feel free to send them to me and I'll upload them in due course. Anything to create a grain of outreach for your mission :-)

[Bjorn Jonsson]

Let me talk with our Public Outreach people and our science team and I'll see if I can get any data released to the "world". What exactly would you guys want? .jpgs? raw binary images? Please let me know and I'll see if I can get any data released.

I myself prefer PDS formatted data and there are probably lots of people here that also prefer it but PNGs are better known and are probably the best option to make the data easier to use for lots of people. As previously discussed, PNGs are far better than JPGs due to the absence of compression artifacts and the fact that they can be 16 bits/pixel when needed. Their only drawback compared to JPGs is bigger files.

[Rich]

I myself prefer PDS formatted data and there are probably lots of people here that also prefer it but PNGs are better known and are probably the best option to make the data easier to use for lots of people. As previously discussed, PNGs are far better than JPGs due to the absence of compression artifacts and the fact that they can be 16 bits/pixel when needed. Their only drawback compared to JPGs is bigger files.

Sorry Bjorn. I don't think the project will release any EPOXI data to the PDS until April and it may not get released to the public until May. You'll have to stay perched on the edge of your computer chair until then. I'll see if I can get anything released to the world, but you may have to settle for .jpgs. Sorry! .jpgs are better than nothing!

~Rich

[Rich]

Mission update:

FYI, we will be taking more pictures of the Earth tomorrow in a similar fashion to how the previous Earth observations were performed (in fact, we're using the exact same sequences, fancy that). However, we will be significantly closer than the Earth Observation that took the lunar transit movie (17 Gm compared to 50 Gm (that's giga-meters, or Mkm (that's Mega-kilometers) (and yes, that's a subnested parenthetic remark)). Since the spacecraft is now north of the ecliptic plane, we will be looking down on the Earth's north pole. A simulated image of what we might see has been floating around JPL. I'll ask around to see if I can post it.

Images will be coming down Saturday.

~Rich

[elakdawalla]

Sweet. Can't wait to see the pics. --Emily

[Rich]

I have noted that EPOXI is not on the Solar System Simulator (http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/) ... Deep Impact is but gives an error if you enter today's date ... which I think would be a good tool to have (both for the general public and to incorporate images into my simulations). So maybe you could suggest to the team at the Solar System Simulator to have EPOXI enabled :-)

Good luck with your mission!

dmueller: It's amazing what a simple e-mail does EPOXI is now in the JPL Solar System Simulator! Thanks for pointing that out to us.

In other news, the images from this weekend's Earth Observation are now on the ground and they look great!

[dmuller]

dmueller: It's amazing what a simple e-mail does EPOXI is now in the JPL Solar System Simulator! Thanks for pointing that out to us.

Thanks for asking, Rich! Have updated the EPOXI Realtime Simulation accordingly.

Incidentally I figured out how to make my website tweet to my Twitter. In due course I hope to get it to periodically tweet mission updates onto my Twitter. Standby.

[Rich]

Hi all,

I just noticed a new article on the EPOXI website by the EPOCh P.I. Drake Deming:

http://epoxi.umd.edu/2science/alienmaps.shtml

Enjoy!

~Rich

[Paolo]

I just noticed a new article on the EPOXI website by the EPOCh P.I. Drake Deming:

There was a presentation on the same subject here: http://www.astro.washington.edu/users/cowa..._lunch_talk.ppt but it has been removed. It is cached on Google in html
http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:wdXK3..._lunch_talk.ppt

[dmuller]

Incidentally I figured out how to make my website tweet to my Twitter. In due course I hope to get it to periodically tweet mission updates onto my Twitter. Standby.

Selected trajectory information about some missions (including EPOXI) are now tweeting automatically to my Twitter account about once every day

[Rich]

There was a presentation on the same subject here: http://www.astro.washington.edu/users/cowa..._lunch_talk.ppt but it has been removed. It is cached on Google in html
http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:wdXK3..._lunch_talk.ppt

Paolo: I can't seem to find those presentations. You don't have a copy of them do you?

~Rich

[Paolo]

Paolo: I can't seem to find those presentations. You don't have a copy of them do you?

~Rich

I don't. I only have saved the cached google copy

[tedstryk]

FYI, Hubble is presently studying Hartley-2 to try to pin down the basic properties of the nucleus, especially the rotation period, so that the information can be incorporated into mission planning.

http://www.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/get-visit-sta...rkupFormat=html
http://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.p...st&id=11990

[Paolo]

FYI, Hubble is presently studying Hartley-2 to try to pin down the basic properties of the nucleus,

Observations have also been carried out by Spitzer, but I have noy seen results published yet http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008sptz.prop50593L