Report from ISAS

		         22 - 28 August 1994
			   Nariaki Nitta
			

SUMMARY 

The Solar activity was very low after the flare-productive region AR 7765
rotated behind the western limb.  We made attempts to observe a filament
or filament channel, but did not a satisfactory result.  A Yohkoh extended 
seminar "Solar Neighborhood Meeting" was quite successful.


OPERATIONS

We had to give up two passes on Friday, because KSC had power outage due 
to a thunder storm.  Otherwise, everything went well with the operations, 
especially thanks to one of the SSOC tohbans, S. Masuda, who understands
all the details of Yohkoh operations as well as the loop-top hard X-ray
source.  JPL may have wondered why we asked them for retransmission of
so many data.  The gateway computer at ISAS to receive the DSN data has
a limited memory.  It no longer receives the data if some amount of data
stay unprocessed.  This happened during the holiday season here, when 
there was hardly anybody to create Sirius database.   However, there seems
to be another problem.  Even after re-transmission, some data turned out 
not to be readable.  Clearly, this problem is being investigated here. 


SOLAR ACTIVITY

What a change from last week!  There were just a few low-B class flares,
and the GOES light curve was almost fixed at the A1 level.  In the latter
half of the week, I found more X-ray bright points than usual, wondering 
why we were not running an XBP campaign.  Does anybody keep track of the
number of XBPs?  It does not necessarily appear to be anti-correlated with
the GOES level.  I recall we saw many XBPs also in June 1992, when the 
activity was not yet at a bottom level.  As of today (29 August), a bright
region is turning up on the east limb.


PERSONNEL

Marilyn Bruner arrived.  She will serve as SXT Chief Observer during the
important period of coordinating with Spartan.  Gary Linford departed after
dealing with many problems around the workstations.


SCIENCE

Further progress was made by Mukul Kundu, Hugh Hudson and Nariaki Nitta on 
the association of type III bursts with X-ray jets/flares.  Kundu and Nitta
almost finalized a paper on two flares that were observed by HXT, and 
started comparing the images of sunspots obtained by SXT and the Nobeyama 
Radio Heliograph.  Marilyn Bruner joined Hudson and Nitta in a so-far not
rewarding attempt of observing a filament or filament channel in the SXT PFIs,
in addition to unloading the data that were obtained during her rocket 
flight on 12 May 1992.  Incidentally, those campaigners outside ISAS can
now easily find how the SXT is operating, by fingering 
campaign@isass0.solar.isas.ac.jp.  Hudson volunteered to update the 
information on a nearly daily basis.


SEMINAR

As announced before, Hudson and Nitta organized a Yohkoh extended (full-day)
seminar, called the first Solar Neighborhood Meeting (24 August).  We had 
often felt that there were two few interactions with the Japanese scientists, 
particularly with non-senior people, who will perhaps become central force 
of Solar-B.  Most local graduate students associated with Yohkoh science not 
only attended the seminar but made quite nice presentations in English.  
Indeed, 12 out of a total of 19 talks were by graduate students.  Kundu told 
me he was impressed at the general quality of their talks.  We will probably 
need to do something like this every six months.