Page 1 PROGRESS REPORT THE SOLAR-A SOFT X-RAY TELESCOPE (SXT) PROGRAM (CONTRACT NAS8-00119) (for April-May 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 A proposal has been submitted to MSFC for the culmination of operations activities in Japan and to initiate Project Galileo, the final data calibration and archiving of Yohkoh data. HIGHLIGHTS We are all saddened by the death of Karen Harvey, a long time friend and collaborator. Her work with the Yohkoh project was invaluable and she will be greatly missed. 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. A new code to make better Synthetic SFCs has been developed and is undergoing tests. Acton completed an analysis of the deterioration of the SXT aspect sensor over the first 13 months of the Yohkoh mission. It seems that the telescope lost sensitivity because of the deposition of some absorbing material on the entrance window of the aspect sensor optics. McKenzie worked on the point spread function of SXT and on the SXT de-scattering procedure. Full-res PFIs from 35 over-the-limb flares were analyzed to estimate the amount of scattering in the four main analysis filters. Sam Freeland prepared the list of OTL flares. He found no evidence for dependence of scattering fraction on the open fraction of the entrance filter. PUBLICATIONS Papers submitted: "The Inadequacy of Temperature Measurements in the Solar Corona Through Narrow-band Filter and Line Ratios" by P.C.H. Martens, J.W. Cirtain, and J.T. Schmelz. Ofman,L. and Aschwanden,M.J. 2002, ApJL, "Damping time scaling of coronal loop oscillations" Chae,J., Poland,A.I., and Aschwanden,M.J. 2002, ApJ, "A model of coronal loops heated by MHD turbulence. I. Isobaric Quiet Sun loops with constant cross-sections" Pevtsov, A. A., Fisher, G. H., Acton, L. W., Longcope, D. W., Johns-Krull, C. M., Kankelborg, C. C., and Metcalf, T. R. : 2002, "The Relationship Between X-ray Radiance and Magnetic Flux", ApJ Letters, submitted Papers accepted: "Coronal holes as seen in soft X-rays by Yohkoh," by H. S. Hudson, SOHO-11 workshop proceedings (ESA). "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. Magun, and M. Rovira, ApJ (Lett). "Simultaneous observation of a Moreton wave on Nov 3, 1999 in H-alpha and soft X-rays," N. Narukage, H. S. Hudson, T. Morimoto, S. Akiyama, R. Kitai, H. Kurokawa and K. Shibata, ApJ. Aschwanden,M.J. and Schrijver,C.J 2002, ApJS, "Analytical Approximations to Hydrodynamic Solutions and Scaling Laws of Coronal Loops" Papers published: "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). "CMEs: How do the puzzle pieces fit together?" E. W. Cliver and H. S. Hudson, JASTP 64, 231 (2002). Pevtsov, A. A.: 2002, "Active Region Filaments and X-ray Sigmoids", Solar Physics, 207, 111-123. 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 April were 78,926 accesses and 6,052 Mbytes transferred for the SXT website and 185,407 accesses and 3,993 Mbytes transferred for the YPOP website. The WEB access statistics in May were 61,277 accesses and 4,973 Mbytes transferred for the SXT website and 137,655 accesses and 2,301 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. ISAS has abandoned attempts to regain control of the spacecraft. Page 7 PERSONNEL TRAVEL 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 SXT Foreign Travel between 1-JUN-02 and 31-JUL-02 BARTUS 1-JUN-02 * 31-JUL-02 * 61 (total of 61 days) NITTA 25-JUL-02 31-JUL-02 * 7 (total of 7 days) TAKEDA 1-JUN-02 * 31-JUL-02 * 61 (total of 61 days) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Grand Total of 129 days for 3 people NOTE: The "*" signifies travel that actually ends after 31-JUL-02 Respectfully submitted, Thomas R. Metcalf Frank Friedlaender ================================================================= Montana State Univ Activity Report for April 2002-May 2002 ================================================================= (D. McKenzie) In April and May, the MSU Solar Physics group worked on the calibration and analysis of solar data, education, and some service to the solar community. We made preparations for summer programs, and for the AAS/SPD meeting. o SCIENCE --------- Martens participated in a three day MURI workshop at UNH, to decide on the best setup for numerical experiments on filament and CME formation and eruption. The final experiment agreed upon is a combination of Martens's `head-to-tail' linkage model for filament formation and Antiochos's `break-out' model for filament eruption -- a complex magnetic structure that actually looks like what one sees with MDI and EIT. Spent quite a bit of time with Winter and Cirtain on loop DEM calculations, and on preparing SPD talks. Martens and Winter made good progress on quantitative error determination in DEM's; curiously enough a subject that has not been resolved yet. Martens and Cirtain worked on background subtraction issues, and hired an undergraduate to work on TRACE and CDS data analysis. Winter began converting his DEM software to SEMAST (Solar Emission Measure Analysis Software Tools), to make it more SSW compliant. McKenzie did some TRACE+SUMER analysis of the April 21 flare with supra-arcade downflows, with Davina Markiewicz-Innes and Tong Jiang Wang, and worked with Terry Forbes and Jun Lin on flare analysis. He discussed arcade fans with Leon Golub & Ed DeLuca, and made estimates of count rates in the faint supra-arcade region. o GALILEO --------- The Yohkoh Galileo Project is moving ahead. A Japan kick-off meeting is tentatively scheduled for 9/10 July at Nobeyama. Davey prepared a poster about Galileo for AAS/SPD; McKenzie and Acton organized a meeting at the AAS/SPD. Sato continued working (with Davey and Yoshimura) on the HXT flare catalogue. That catalogue now covers from the beginning of Yohkoh operations to the end. Corrections of saturated flares are now being made; later, a booklet version of the catalogue will be prepared. Some information about the catalogue was prepared for the Albuquerque meeting. Acton completed an analysis of the deterioration of the SXT aspect sensor over the first 13 months of the Yohkoh mission. It seems that the telescope lost sensitivity because of the deposition of some absorbing material on the entrance window of the aspect sensor optics. Acton also worked with Friedlaender and Lemen on the MSU cost proposal for the Galileo Project. McKenzie worked on the point spread function of SXT and on the de-scattering procedure. Thanks to Sam Freeland for preparing a list of over-the-limb flares: 35 flares were analyzed to produce an estimate of the scattering amplitude in the four main analysis filters. No evidence was found for dependence of scattering amplitude on the open fraction of the entrance filter. McKenzie made major revisions to the programs SXT_PSF and SXT_DECON, and uploaded via SSW_CONTRIB. (NOTE: the deconvolution software doesn't properly handle NuDen filter yet.) Prepared a poster for AAS/SPD with co-authors Gburek, Acton, and Martens. Documents for the Galileo project may be found at http://solar.physics.montana.edu/SXT/Galileo o SERVICE --------- Martens started working on plans for the Virtual Solar Observatory with Joe Gurman, Frank Hill, and Rick Bogart. Prepared talk for SPD VSO session. Martens reviewed four proposals for the current NASA SR&T round. Winter organized an MSU Solar Physics Group meet-n-greet in order to get undergraduates attending this year's AAS meeting to think of solar physics as a branch of astrophysics and to showcase MSU's prominent role in that field. o PUBLICATIONS -------------- Martens submitted an ApJ Letter, "The Inadequacy of Temperature Measurements in the Solar Corona Through Narrow-band Filter and Line Ratios" by P.C.H. Martens, J.W. Cirtain, and J.T. Schmelz. With Dave Cauffman and Mark Weber, Martens made progress with the Y10 proceedings; only a few papers are still missing, and may not make it into the book. Some 60% of the papers have completed the refereeing process, and most of the rest is near acceptance. Related, several of us completed our revisions to Y10 papers and resubmitted. Martens, Cirtain, and Winter presented research at the Montana Academy of Science. o OUTREACH AND EDUCATION ------------------------ The Symphony Nr. 5, "Apocalypse" by Karl Weigl has come out, with a full disk SXT image on the cover. See: http://www.jpc.de/jpcdb/artsearch/showjpcart.html?artnum=1091816&languag e=de&searchmax=29&searchid=48273635&searchcount=25&realm=jpcgruen&xorder by=date&searchuri=fastsearch.html&fastsearch=weigl Martens gave Q&A and presentation for his daughter's 4th grade class on astrophysics and solar physics, with cool film clips (well received!). He finished the teaching part of Electro- and Magnetostatics; started working with Ivy Merriot on the on-line catalog of prominences and sigmoids jointly observed by SXT and GBO's, with a list of about 100 for the entire mission. This work is funded by a Murdock grant, and includes Alex Pevtsov for the Sac Peak part. Martens wrote the 4/26 SXT Nugget on prominences, reporting part of the work with summer student Paul Wood from St. Andrews in the summer of 2000. Acton traveled to Stockholm where he "played astronaut" at a large children's event. McKenzie maintained and updated the SXT website, and reformatted the SXT Chief Observer's weekly reports at http://solar.physics.montana.edu/nuggets/ and mirror sites at Lockheed, ISAS, and MSSL. He made some contribution to the April 19 nugget. Provided SXT images for an article in May 31 issue of Science magazine. Edited YPOP webpages to defeat numerous SPAM lists, and compiled MSU's bimonthly contract report. Finally, we completed the selection for the summer 2002 REU program. We had more than 80 applicants, and we narrowed it down to five. These students will be working with Canfield, Leamon, Longcope, McKenzie, and Regnier on solar physics for 10 weeks, beginning in early June. =========================================================================== Solar Physics Research Corp. Activity Report for April 2002-May 2002 =========================================================================== KAREN L. HARVEY: Karen Harvey died on April 30, 2002. This report was prepared by J. Harvey. During April, Karen continued to work on a program for detailed comparisons between coronal holes observed with Yohkoh/SXT and NSO/KP He I 1083 nm spectroheliograms. From what I saw of the data, there were significant differences that could be attributed to obscuration of the base of the coronal hole by overlying X-ray emission in the SXT data. An amendment to the subcontract was received to ensure funding through July. Plans for June and July: J. Harvey will continue to carry out management and contract functions as best he can. The scientific activities planned by Karen will not be continued. There will be no further costs to the program attributable to either Karen or Jack Harvey. That is, the invoice for work done in April, 2002 is the last one which will include K. Harvey expenses. HUGH S. HUDSON The bulk of my effort for April was on RHESSI items, but I did spend four days at ISAS. On Yohkoh the main effort has been in the area of "skinny coronal holes," a topic that arose during Kahler's visit in 2001 and for which we have submitted an abstract to Solar Wind 10. Research time in May was split between RHESSI (getting ready for SPD) and Yohkoh (summary paper presented at the FASR workshop; see http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~hhudson/presentations). The RHESSI work consisted of confirming - not that there was much doubt - the prevalence of the soft-hard-soft signature in solar hard X-ray bursts. The result was as expected, but more reliable given the higher resolution of RHESSI. The exciting aspect of this will be to follow the soft-hard-soft development in the context of the images; we now are pretty sure that hard X-ray bursts do not develop temporally in idealized loop volumes, but instead sequentially in discrete fibers. Perhaps the spectral evolution together with the spatial evolution will enable us to learn something about the coronal restructuring. Plans for June and July There will be posters on the RHESSI data at the SPD meeting in June (see http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~hhudson/presentations) and on Yohkoh coronal-hole observations at the Solar Wind 10 meeting, also in June. In July I will attend the Galileo meeting at Nobeyama. During this period I hope to be able to complete my background estimator for RHESSI spectroscopy and to move on to working with the radius data. In flare research, the hope is to get started on a second paper dealing with ribbon behavior (comparing TRACE and Yohkoh). PUBLIC SERVICE: Refereeing for Solar Physics, ApJ, JGR, a monograph, and a conference proceedings. Helped or wrote science nuggets, including one on the April 21 X-class flare. The TRACE movies show the SAD phenomenon but also other fascinating new things, and the RHESSI data have comprehensive coverage. LITERATURE: Papers accepted: "Coronal holes as seen in soft X-rays by Yohkoh," by H. S. Hudson, SOHO-11 workshop proceedings (ESA). "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. Magun, and M. Rovira, ApJ (Lett). "Simultaneous observation of a Moreton wave on Nov 3, 1999 in H-alpha and soft X-rays," N. Narukage, H. S. Hudson, T. Morimoto, S. Akiyama, R. Kitai, H. Kurokawa and K. Shibata, ApJ. Papers published: "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). "CMEs: How do the puzzle pieces fit together?" E. W. Cliver and H. S. Hudson, JASTP 64, 231 (2002). TAKEDA AKI: Completed the science nugget of 5-Apr-2002 edition, 'WBS flare statistics'. http://isass1.solar.isas.ac.jp/nuggets/2002/020405/020405.html It is based on the intensive work done by Y. Matsumoto at the University of Tokyo, and turn out to be the first memorable nugget featuring the Yohkoh/WBS instrument. The rest of April was devoted to install an improved version of the Magpack2 software, which is a Fortran- and C-based magnetic field calculation package written by T. Sakurai. The purpose of this work is to get coronal magnetic field images from the KPSO photospheric magnetic field synoptic maps, which I am using in my coronal hole study. As a first step, the software was installed in my personal directory on Flare workstations at ISAS. So far, it is found that some displaying functions do not work properly on our X-window system, while the most programs for calculation seems to work with no problem. Although it is necessary to contact T. Sakurai in person to solve this problem, I unfortunately missed the chance to visit NAOJ and meet him during this May. From early to mid May, I spent exciting weeks with the balloon team at NAOJ and ISAS lead by S. Tsuneta. This is a project to observe solar flares with the Te-Cd hard X-ray spectrometer. I was invited to join the project as a member of the solar-activity forecasting group, since I had worked with them at their former flight in the last August, when the coordinated observation with SXT had been planned but got little product due to the low activity of the sun. In preparation for their second flight of this May, I carefully monitored the change of the solar activity from 1 rotation before to date, checked the past events occurred under the activity of similar level, and reported my view to the team. The balloon was launched on the early morning (JST) on 24th May and they finally succeed in obtaining the spectra of the M1.2 flare occurred around 15:30JST(6:30UT) on the same day. The detector was captured from the Japan Sea and the detailed spectra are analyzed by K. Kobayashi of Univ. of Tokyo. Their first output is demonstrated in the following URL. http://solarwww.mtk.nao.ac.jp/kobayashi/balloon/2002new/ JANOS BARTUS Activities for April and May, 2002: ----------------------------------- Due to a change in configuration of the new open-ssh package installed on flare20, the remote execution from the software account from isass5 on flare20 failed. I fixed the problem. In the new linux box, curly, the driver of the 3Com network card was incompatible with the SMP kernel and resulted in unstable network connection. I replaced the NIC with a SiS 900 chip based card. In the same computer the WD harddisk holding the system failed. I replaced the disk with a spare Matrox disk. I kept the linux systems updated through the RedHat Network. I reran a password cracker program against the password databases of our computers in order to ensure there are no easily crackable password entries. I ran the latest nessus portmapper and security checker against all of our computers. It found several security holes, which I managed to patch in by software updates or proper software reconfigurations. I updated and configured the latest apache webserver, PHP web scripting package, the sendmail mail transporter and ssh secure shell from sources, for all the computers it concerned. I installed and tested the Globus GRID toolkit on isass0/1, moe and curly. I also did many general sysadmin tasks. Plans for June and July, 2002: ------------------------------ We would like to continue testing and using the local GRID I managed to setup at ISAS. The main thing would be to run distributed computations. To do so applications have to be (re)written using the MPI (Message Passing Interface) libraries. One of the main goal with this is to try to realize a distributed SSC file generation. I would like to develop a WWW based tool written in PHP web scripting language for doing remote system checking and simple system administration tasks. Collaboration with Greg Slater who visits ISAS in July. The actual works haven't been fixed yet. 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 June 2002 April-May 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 April-May 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 | ------------------------|------------------------|-----------------|-----------