Page 1 PROGRESS REPORT THE SOLAR-A SOFT X-RAY TELESCOPE (SXT) PROGRAM (CONTRACT NAS8-00119) (for February-March 2002) OVERVIEW The YOHKOH Mission is a program of the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) with collaboration by the U. S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U. K. Science and Engineering Research Council. The YOHKOH satellite was launched on 30 August 1991 from Kagoshima Space Center (KSC) in Japan. The purpose of this mission is to study high energy phenomena in solar flares and the Sun's corona. Under an international cooperative agreement, Lockheed Martin, under NASA contract, is providing a scientific investigation using the Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT), one of the primary experiments of the mission. The SXT was developed at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in cooperation with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Tokyo. MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC ACTIVITIES IN THE MONTH The effort is transitioning from an operational mission to one of archiving data for future use. This is an extensive effort after more than ten years of operations. HIGHLIGHTS A very productive kickoff meeting for the Yohkoh Galileo project was held in Palo Alto where we produced a "white paper" that NASA will use as the basis of an RFQ. Acton, Metcalf, and Shirts continue to work on the Synthetic SFC algorithm. Test software has been generated and the shortcomings of our present scheme are better understood. The worst problem is that the N-S coverage of the terminator (SFT) database is inadequate to determine SynSFC coefficients by simple interpolation. It is ironic that efforts to keep Yohkoh stably pointed against seasonal drift, in order to improve terminator performance for normal SFCs, works against us in the generation of synthetic SFCs. Martens is working on the proceedings of the Yohkoh 10th anniversary meeting, and the progress is good: only two months after the meeting we have more than 90% of the papers in and most are in an advanced stage of refereeing. PUBLICATIONS Papers submitted: "Coronal holes as Seen in Soft X-Rays by Yohkoh", to SOHO-11 workshop proceedings. Aschwanden,M.J., Slater,G.L., Lemen,J.R., Metcalf,T.R., Freeland,S.L., Shirts,P., and Acton,L.W. 2002, ApJL (revised, 2002 March 6) "Is the Quiet Sun Corona Heated by Active Regions or by the Network" Papers accepted: "Boundary Structures and Changes in Long-Lived Coronal Holes," Kahler, S.W., and Hudson, H.S., ApJ "Solar submm and gamma-ray burst emission," by P. Kaufmann, J.-P. Raulin, A.M. Melo, E. Correia, J.E.R. Costa, C.G. Gimenez de Castro, A.V.R. Silva, M. Yoshimori, H.S. Hudson, W.Q. Gan, D.E. Gary, P.T. Gallagher, H. Levato, A. Marun, and M. Rovira, ApJ (Lett). Aschwanden,M.J. 2002, Space Science Reviews, 240p, "Particle Acceleration and Kinematics in Solar Flares. A Synthesis of Recent Observations and Theoretical Concepts (Invited Review)" Aschwanden,M.J. 2002, in Proc. Yohkoh 10th Anniversary Meeting, Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, COSPAR Colloquia Series (eds. P.C.H. Martens and D.Cauffman), Elsevier Science, (in press) "Reconciliation of the Coronal Heating Function between Yohkoh and TRACE Metcalf, T. R., Mickey, D. L., LaBonte, B. J., Ryder, L. A. 2002, in Proc. Yohkoh 10th Anniversary Meeting, Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, COSPAR Colloquia Series (eds. P.C.H. Martens and D.Cauffman), Elsevier Science, (in press) "The Magnetic Free Energy in Active Regions". Papers published: "Solar disappearing filament inside a coronal hole," Chertok, I. M., Obridko, E. I., Mogilevsky, V. N., Shilova, N. S., and Hudson, H. S., ApJ 567, 1225-1233 (2002). "The Magnetic Structure and Generation of EUV Flare Ribbons", by L. Fletcher and H. Hudson, Solar Phys. 204, 69 (2001). "A Hard X-ray Two-Ribbon Flare Observed with Yohkoh/HXT", by S. Masuda, T. Kosugi, and H.S. Hudson, Solar Phys. 204, 55 (2001). PUBLIC USE OF SXT IMAGES We are continuing to make Yohkoh/SXT images available for a variety of uses. We receive requests for the Yohkoh posters (#2 and #3) by way of the form on the SXT homepage. Currently we receive requests via our homepage at the rate of 2 or 3 per day. The WEB access statistics in February and March were 175,943 accesses and 12,920 Mbytes transferred for the SXT website and 355,265 accesses and 6,277 Mbytes transferred for the YPOP website. YOHKOH OPERATIONS AND HEALTH Data collection stopped on December 14 as a direct result of the near-total solar eclipse of that day, which Yohkoh intercepted over the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and the Galapagos. This resulted in a loss of control and an under-voltage condition. Yohkoh is rotating at about 1 RPM around its Y axis (solar EW direction of motion) and slowly precessing. Page 7 PERSONNEL TRAVEL SXT Foreign Travel between 1-FEB-02 and 31-MAR-02 BARTUS 1-MAR-02 31-MAR-02 * 31 (total of 31 days) TAKEDA 1-FEB-02 * 31-MAR-02 * 59 (total of 59 days) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Grand Total of 90 days for 2 people NOTE: The "*" signifies travel that actually ends after 31-MAR-02 SXT Foreign Travel between 1-APR-02 and 31-MAY-02 BARTUS 1-APR-02 * 31-MAY-02 * 61 (total of 61 days) TAKEDA 1-APR-02 * 31-MAY-02 * 61 (total of 61 days) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Grand Total of 122 days for 2 people NOTE: The "*" signifies travel that actually ends after 31-MAY-02 Respectfully submitted, Thomas R. Metcalf Frank Friedlaender ================================================================= Montana State Univ Activity Report for February 2002-March 2002 ================================================================= (D. McKenzie) The group was heavily involved in a wide variety of efforts during this early spring period, including proposals, outreach, and a great deal of research. * SCIENCE In February Acton worked on the SXT data analysis aspects of papers with Markus Aschwanden, Jing Li, and Alex Pevtsov. Acton also provided mission-long SXT spectral irradiance results to Linton Floyd at the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory. Acton continued working with Tom Metcalf and Phil Shirts on the Synthetic SFC algorithm. Test software has been generated and the shortcomings of the present scheme are better understood. The worst problem is that the N-S coverage of the terminator (SFT) database is inadequate to determine SynSFC coefficients by simple interpolation. It is ironic that efforts to keep Yohkoh stably pointed against seasonal drift, in order to improve terminator performance for normal SFCs, works against us in the generation of synthetic SFCs. Acton is also working to better quantify the true change in x-ray response caused by entrance filter failures. Initial results for the 27 Oct 92, the zeroeth failure event, are encouraging. Canfield worked with MSU undergraduate Zachary Blehm to apply a code developed by Alex Pevtsov and Bob Leamon to measure of the size and shear angle of sigmoids in SXT SFD images. The goal of this project is to obtain a quantitative measure of the non-potentiality of the corona of active regions based exclusively on X-ray imaging. He worked with MSU undergraduate Patricia Jibben to furnish Van Driel and Hudson white light flare data from Mees Solar Observatory for several events early in the Yohkoh mission. Martens submitted a proposal to SR&T 2001 (second round) for integrated modeling of loop soft and hard X-ray emission, combining a loop gasdynamics code with a particle code, both resident at MSU, for modeling joint observations of HESSI and TRACE, as well as archival data from HXT & SXT. The proposed research includes one grad student. Martens and McKenzie attended an SDO proposal meeting at Stanford. McKenzie developed estimates for telescope responses to plasmas of different temperatures; worked with Stanford, LMSAL, SAO, and various folks at MSU on E/PO plans. At the meeting Martens presented a talk about the unreliability of temperatures derived from narrow-band filter ratios from TRACE and EIT, a pitfall to be avoided by chosing a sufficient number of passbands for the SDO EUV imager. Martens and grad student Jonathan Cirtain are preparing an ApJ Letter on this subject. Martens also worked with grad student Trae Winter on a version of the 3-body problem. Sato worked on HESSI imaging software and its data analysis, adjusting (and improving!) software of imaging (MEM sato). Four programs, with different versions, have been prepared as follows. (1) Standard MEM Sato Program (2) MEM using Cash statistics instead of normal Chi2 statistics (3) MEM including an estimation of flux variation (4) A special version for preliminary data analysis using actual HESSI data. Versions (1) - (3) were tested using simulated data and Version (4) was tested using actual HESSI data. Also, Sato is working with some Japanese colleagues on problems of mapping and Yohkoh software (conv_**.pro), to rectify different results of image position in different sites, e.g., Kyoto, Nobeyama, ISAS and MSU. Sato began a new version of Yohkoh HXT Image catalogue. Davey continued work on web interface to HXT Flare image catalogue; also, patched SSH on all MSU systems and numerous other security updates. We received the good news that the Stanford/NSO/MSU proposal "Designs for a Virtual Solar Observatory" was accepted, as well as Martens's proposal to the M.J. Murdock Foundation entitled "Correlation Between Solar Sigmoids and Prominences", which will allow a local High School teacher to work with Piet and Alex Pevtsov to develop a visual on-line sigmoid- prominence catalog for the duration of the Yohkoh mission. * SERVICE & OUTREACH Canfield handed over to McKenzie the reformatting of the SXT Chief Observer's weekly reports at http://solar.physics.montana.edu/nuggets/ and mirror sites at Lockheed, ISAS, and MSSL. Sato wrote a science nugget and helped a data analysis of Type-C solar flare. McKenzie maintained and updated the SXT website. Provided suggestions to the GSFC press team about their story on homologous flares, based on research by Nitta & Hudson. Martens refereed two papers for Y10, and submitted one with co-authors Gburek and Janusz Sylwester on results for Blind Iterative Deconvolution. Davey, Sato, and McKenzie each refereed one paper for the Yohkoh 10 proceedings, and worked on revisions to their submitted papers. Martens also continued working with Dave Cauffman on the proceedings of Y10, and the progress is good: only two months after the meeting we have more than 90% of the papers in and most are in an advanced stage of refereeing. The deadline for applications for our REU program for 2002 has passed and we got more than 80 applications this year! Unfortunately we can only select six, but it will be a first class program again, with weekly lectures on topics from Solar Phsyics. Martens refereed a paper for ApJ and one for Solar Physics. * YOHKOH GALILEO PROJECT During this period, Acton, Davey, Sato, and McKenzie worked to begin a grand plan, called the Galileo Project, to archive the Yohkoh data and important documentation for posterity. Good progress has been made and both the Japanese and the British have signed on to the concept. A very productive kick-off meeting was held in Palo Alto, where we produced a "white paper" that NASA will use as the basis of an RFQ. * MISCELLANEOUS The group hosted Dr. Peter Hoyng, from the Space Research Lab in Utrecht, and supervisor for Piet Martens's first Postdoc position, for a visit at MSU. He gave a Solar Journal Club presentation on the derivation of the mean field dynamo equations, a department colloquium on "Stochastic Effects in Mean Field Dynamos", and interacted with graduate students. =========================================================================== Solar Physics Research Corp. Activity Report for February 2002-March 2002 =========================================================================== KAREN L. HARVEY: Activities for February and March 2002: (1) Continuing with a comparison of the coronal holes identified in NSO/KP He I 10830 rotation maps and with corresponding Yohkoh/SXT rotation maps to determine if the structures identified as coronal holes in He I 10830 all are associated with low emission areas. A program is being written to view coronal hole boundaries superimposed on the synoptic He I 10830 spectroheliograms, magnetograms, and SXT images to better follow coronal holes, their formation and evolution. Isolated coronal holes appear to form in a specific magnetic field configuration; we are examining whether this a sufficient and/or necessary condition. Plans for April and May: Continued analysis (1) of the association of coronal holes observed in He I 10830 spectroheliograms and the SXT full-frame and synoptic images; this includes isolated, non-polar coronal holes, as well as the transient coronal holes; of particular interest is the formation of coronal holes and of polar extensions; (1) with T. Forbes of the reconnection rate of magnetic fields during long-duration arcade events/He I 10830 2-ribbon flares and comparison of the transient coronal holes with X-ray/EUV dimmings; (3) return to a collaborative project with Keith Strong on the solar cycle variation of XBP started in 1995 for a paper presented the 1996 Bath meeting. HUGH S. HUDSON Activities for February and March 2002: HESSI is working fine, and I spent some time helping with software and science overview - there is a weekly "tohban" appointment that rotates among HESSI-related people at Berkeley, and I took the last week in March. Most of my science activity, however, involved working on Yohkoh coronal-hole observations for a presentation at the SOHO-11 workshop and for its conference proceedings. The draft paper is on line as http://isass1.solar.isas.ac.jp/~hudson/drafts/davos.pdf in case anybody would like to help; this proceedings is not refereed and I am worried that nobody will ever read this paper. The SOHO-11 meeting was notable, at least in my eyes, (i) for learning that one can actually determine the solar open flux empirically, i.e., without recourse to a source-surface model (work of M. Lockwood), and (ii) for being reminded, by Auchere's presentation, that the limb of the Sun behaves most strangely in coronal holes. TALKS: (see http://isass1.solar.isas.ac.jp/~hudson/talks "White-light flares and HESSI" (RAS, March 8, 2002) "Poster rapporteur notes" (SOHO-11, March 12, 2002) "Coronal holes as viewed in soft X-rays" (SOHO-11, March 13, 2002) PUBLIC SERVICE: Refereeing for JBIS, ApJ, SSR; Yohkoh science nuggets. PUBLICATIONS: Paper submitted "Coronal holes as Seen in Soft X-Rays by Yohkoh", to SOHO-11 workshop proceedings. Paper accepted "Boundary Structures and Changes in Long-Lived Coronal Holes," Kahler, S.W., and Hudson, H.S., ApJ "Solar submm and gamma-ray burst emission," by P. Kaufmann, J.-P. Raulin, A.M. Melo, E. Correia, J.E.R. Costa, C.G. Gimenez de Castro, A.V.R. Silva, M. Yoshimori, H.S. Hudson, W.Q. Gan, D.E. Gary, P.T. Gallagher, H. Levato, A. Marun, and M. Rovira, ApJ (Lett). Paper published "Solar disappearing filament inside a coronal hole," Chertok, I. M., Obridko, E. I., Mogilevsky, V. N., Shilova, N. S., and Hudson, H. S., ApJ 567, 1225-1233 (2002). "The Magnetic Structure and Generation of EUV Flare Ribbons", by L. Fletcher and H. Hudson, Solar Phys. 204, 69 (2001). "A Hard X-ray Two-Ribbon Flare Observed with Yohkoh/HXT", by S. Masuda, T. Kosugi, and H.S. Hudson, Solar Phys. 204, 55 (2001). TAKEDA AKI: Activities for February and March 2002: Even after the Yohkoh ceased scientific observation since the last December, Yohkoh team at ISAS continues to monitor the S/C status a few times a day. They decided to keep the operations on a continuing basis, at least, until the end of April. In order to prepare the schedule of these operations, we are requested to keep the orbital elements and ephemeris files securely updated on our WS, isass5, otherwise the contact schedules predicted by NASDA and our WS often result in several minutes of inconsistency. To prevent this, I regularly check the history of files and, if needed, ask the software people for the update of files. By general consent among SXT_COs, we will maintain the science nuggets as long as possible. My contributions done in these period are: http://isass1.solar.isas.ac.jp/sxt_co/020215.html It reports highlights from the Y10 meeting, introducing two synoptic studies done by E. Benevolenskaya and J. Lin, respectively. http://isass1.solar.isas.ac.jp/sxt_co/020405.html It is also a review of recent study of flares observed with Yohkoh/WBS done by Y. Matsumoto of Tokyo University. Although the date of issue is in April, the last week in March was spent to prepare the article. On the 25th February, the Japan's minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology visited ISAS and our research room. As she is an important guest, prof. Kosugi naturally guided her around ISAS. I set up our room and operated the movie server during her stay in our room. JANOS BARTUS Activities for February and March 2002: Pollux had permanent problems, probably due to a flaky SCSI hardware component. It rebooted randomly, twice or more in a week. In those cases often manual operation was necessary to recover the system. I tried many different ways to repair pollux. It is still unclear which reparation procedure helped, but the problem has disappeared and pollux has been running smoothly since then. The entire TRACE database has been successfully mirrored from Lockheed. Now only the regular daily update is being done. The TRACE database is supposed to be accessible from ISAS' DARTS server too. I wrote a script, which uploaded the database to the DARTS server and keeps it updated automatically. Recently many sites have been cracked around the world where some of the old secure shell versions were installed. Since ssh is one of the main way to connect to a computer remotely, the crackers tend to exploit its loopholes and the weak configurations. I have kept ssh updated on isass0/1/5, pollux, moe, curly, flare29 with the latest versions available. The IMAP mailserver's ssl (secure socket layer) certificate expired on isass1. I updated it. Since the recent cracking of castor.lmsal.com, the security checkings have become even more important issues for me. I have paid more attention on the systems security. Every day I spent some time to look through the logfiles, check the system integrity with the help of tripwire reports to search for the traces of any attempt of intrusions. With the help of Red Hat Network several dozens of packages were updated on our linux systems. I setup up a new computer delivered from Lockheed (now named curly), which was supposed to become the new isass5 computer. Since isass5 is not a key machine anymore we decided to find a better usage for it. It is a strong dual-processor system, with large, failsafe storage area. It will be a solar database server and a member of the GRID computational system. The windows registry files got corrupted on the videoserver after a program installation. I repaired it. I updated and reconfigured the samba server on isass1. Now the home, data and scratch areas as well as the printers are securely shared from isass1 so that they can be accessed from the windows systems within ISAS' solar network. I setup the DVD creation environment on the new videoserver and created copies of our "Whole Sun SXT Movie" DVD video archive for distribution purposes. I have started to setup a globus GRID computer system using our linux machines. Plans for April and May: I intend to build up and test a globus computational GRID. Various security improvements and checking will be done like updating and using the Nessus security port checker, regular password security checking using password cracker programs etc. I will setup a backup and logfile server. I'm going to study the web database management with the use of PHP and XML languages. Page 8 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NASA REPORT DOCUMENTATION PAGE (IN LIEU OF NASA FORM 1626) --------------------|--------------------------|------------------------------- 1. REPORT NO. | 2. GOVERNMENT | 3. RECIPIENT'S DR-01 | ACCESSION NO. | CATALOG NO. --------------------|--------------------------|------------------------------- 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE | 5. REPORT DATE Monthly progress report - for the month of | 10 Aprily 2002 February-March 2002 |------------------------------- | 6. PERFORMING ORG | CODE: O/L9-41 -----------------------------------------------|------------------------------- 7. AUTHOR(S) | 8. PERFORMING ORGANIZA- T. R. Metcalf | TION REPORT NO: F. M. Friedlaender | |------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------|10. WORK UNIT NO. 9. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAME AND ADDRESS | Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space |------------------------------- Advanced Technology Center, O/L9-41, B/252 |11. CONTRACT OR GRANT NO. 3251 Hanover Street, Palo Alto Ca. 94304 | NAS8 - 00119 -----------------------------------------------|------------------------------- 12. SPONSORING AGENCY NAME AND ADDRESS |13. TYPE OF REPORT AND Marshall Space Flight Center (Explorer Program)| PERIOD COVERED Huntsville Alabama 35812 | Progress report for the month Contact: Larry Hill | of February-March 2002 |------------------------------- |14. SPONSORING AGENCY | CODE MSFC / AP32 -----------------------------------------------|------------------------------- 15. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 16. ABSTRACT The SOLAR-A Mission is a program of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), the Japanese agency for scientific space activity. The SOLAR-A satellite was launched on August 30, 1991, to study high energy phenomena in solar flares. As an international cooperative agreement, Lockheed, under NASA contract, is providing a scientific investigation and has prepared the Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT), one of the two primary experiments of the mission. --------------------------------------|---------------------------------------- 17. KEY WORDS (SUGGESTED BY | 18. DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT AUTHOR(S)) Solar-A, X-ray, CCD, | Space Science, Solar Physics ------------------------|-------------|----------|-----------------|----------- 19. SECURITY CLASSIF. | 20. SECURITY CLASSIF. | 21. NO OF PAGES |22. PRICE (OF THIS REPORT) | (OF THIS PAGE) | | None | None | 12 | ------------------------|------------------------|-----------------|-----------