Report on the Uranus at Equinox Atmospheres planning group,
Pasadena Oct 8, 2006
This meeting was the second meeting in the ‘Uranus at Equinox'
international collaboration group. It followed on from the initial
two-day meeting in May 2006, which I attended as a Europlanet delegate
and have previously reported upon. This second meeting centred in on
the Atmospheres sub-group of observers; a separate meeting for
satellite observations will occur at Observatoire de Paris on Nov
16-18, 2006 and is being organised by Jean-Eudes Arlot.
The workshop began by re-iterating the main atmospheric and ionospheric science goals:
- What is the effect of solar forcing on giant planet atmospheres?
- What
are the relative roles of dynamics and radiation in controlling
atmospheric properties, and what are the timescales and phase lags?
- How does Uranus' tilt and offset magnetic axis affect magnetosphere/atmosphere/solar interactions?
- What is the temperature as a function of altitude (few bars to microbars) and latitude?
- How does Uranus' tilt and offset magnetic axis affect magnetosphere/atmosphere/solar interactions?
- Why is the upper atmosphere temperature much hotter than can be explained by solar UV heating?
- Can
we determine the position of the auroral zones, and use them to measure
the rotation rate more accurately than it is currently known?
Beyond these science goals, there was general agreement that there
should also be a effort to continue public outreach; both magazine and
on-line articles were given as examples of recent publications that had
been used effectively to promote Uranian studies, with a recent paper
describing an non-impact origin for the oblique rotational angle of
Uranus being given as an example of something that can be turned into
an easily understood science article, in this case in an on-line blog.
The meeting included an update to current work in
progress, preparing for next year. This covered science from a wide
variety of telescopes, from HST through to radar. There was also
representation from the amateur astronomy community - in line with the
recent Europlanet workshop on amateur-professional collaboration:
Uranus already has a strong working relationship between the two
groups. Using >11" telescopes combined with adaptive optics systems,
amateurs are able to distinguish the hemispheric N-S asymmetry, and
possibly even some of the bright variations seen by larger telescopes.
This is considered essential if there are sudden changes in the polar
brightness ratio during the equinox period, as amateurs may be able to
target the planet on a much shorter timescale.
In preparing for the coming year, it was suggested
that as a community we attempt to observe at the same period so that
multi-wavelength, multi-PI coverage could be provided during this
period. A date has not yet been finalised for this concentrated period,
but the period around opposition (~Sep 9, 2007) was suggested. However,
because the atmospheric community do not need to observe at the exact
times of ring-plane crossing, as seen from Earth, it was strongly
recommended to avoid the three periods when ring-plane crossings occur,
as they are of strong importance to the satellite and ring communities.
It was also again strongly recommended that discussions should be made
with telescope directors and TAC panel members to highlight the
upcoming observations next year.
I again spoke on behalf of Europlanet, and highlighted the success of
the Europlanet meeting last month. It is notable that at the last
meeting in May no-one from America had heard of Europlanet until I
spoke about it, and I met a number of those same scientist at the
meeting last month. There was a lot of interest about using Europlanet
as a path to collaboration in the future.
Further information about the most recent
developments within this planning group will be available on the
International Outer Planets Watch: Uranus and Neptune discipline
website, hosted at www.apl.ucl.ac.uk/iopw .
|
N3 Reports 
