Edited by Peter Lawson
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Editorial: 3 August 2001
Peter R. Lawson.
3 August 2001
With your indulgence, and in keeping with my previous editorial, I will limit
my comments to a summary of my own progress with OLBIN, the Michelson Summer
Schools, and other matters of more personal concern.
Lawson goes to Washington
It is quite likely that I will be detailed to NASA Headquarters sometime before
Christmas this year.
In my efforts to keep track of Jobs for the OLBIN Job listings,
last year I became aware of an opening at NASA Headquarters for an
Interferometry Discipline Scientist. This was announced by Harley
Thronson at a TPF SWG meeting in Pasadena in September or October 2000.
By the time of the AAS Meeting in San Diego (January 2001), I had heard
no further news of this position, but yet wanted more information so I
could post it on OLBIN. By an indirect inquiry on my part and a
misunderstanding of my intentions, I received a call from Headquarters later in
January asking me if I was indeed interested in the job. Quite a few months
have passed since then, and now the paperwork is seriously underway to
get me to Washington. It is still possible that the move might be halted,
but it is looking more and more certain.
The posting will be for 1 year initially, and possibly
extended for another year, through the
Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA)
as implemented within NASA (see the IPA Desk Guide).
I will continue to be a JPL employee, but will be working as a
Discipline Scientist for Anne Kinney in the Office of Space Science. The role
of the position would be to advise NASA HQ on progress with its interferometry
missions within the Origins Program and to provide technical advice.
There are six missions supported by NASA: PTI, Keck Interferometer,
Starlight, SIM, TPF, and LBT. Phil Crane is currently filling the role of
Discipline Scientist for these programs, and my understanding is that I would
work with him and share his responsibilities.
I would nonetheless have 20% of
my time to pursue my own interests, and with this time I would propose to
continue supporting the Michelson Summer Schools, OLBIN, and my role as
Chair of the IAU Working Group on Optical/IR Interferometry.
So as to protect my work with the Summer Schools, I am planning to spend one
day per week away from Headquarters at the US Naval Observatory, and for which
I have the support of both Anne Kinney and Ken Johnston. So,
I will continue the Summer Schools as before, and keep expanding OLBIN as time permits.
2001 Michelson Summer School
I am in the process of putting together the Web-based proceedings from the
2001 School, which was held in May this year. If you've read this far you
may be interested to see where I am with it. Have a look then at
http://olbin.jpl.nasa.gov/iss2001/.
It is incomplete (the real-audio is not finished yet, and two viewgraph sets have not
yet been included), and is still being edited, so expect to run into broken or
incomplete links. The site will be moved to the SIM web pages when it is finished.
I also hope to issue the software and the web-proceedings to the participants as a
2-CD set, of which I currently only plan to make about 50 copies. The software can
now be downloaded from http://olbin.jpl.nasa.gov/iss2001/software/, and I hope to improve the installation instructions
as time permits.
2002 Michelson Summer School
The 2002 Michelson Summer School will take place at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics, 24-28 June 2002, and will be mostly a repeat of the
1999 School. With this school in mind, I would like to start working towards
an improved book of course notes, published by a commerical publisher. The
computer labs of the 2000 school went very well, and I would somehow like to
include more labs in next years school - but just how this would happen is
unclear to me. Debi Fambro will be leaving JPL later
this year (first to Israel and eventually to her native Palao), but she is
nonetheless working already with Wes Traub and Mike Pearlman at CfA to
make the appropriate arrangements and
reserve the accommodations in Cambridge/Boston.
A Newsgroup for OLBIN?
Ettore Pedretti has strongly suggested to me that there should be an email
newsgroup on OLBIN, modelled after the Forum HRA. At JPL I would not be
allowed to host such a newsgroup unless I personally reviewed every posting
prior to making it public. This I think would make the newsgroup too sterile
to be of use to the community, so my preference would be for another site to
host it.
A Hypermail site at
a University is my personal preference, but another avenue might be for a
Yahoo Group to be established such as
the one used for
Research Announcements by NASA's Office of Space Science. Any volunteers? Suggestions?
Peter Lawson
3 August 2001
Maintained by Peter Lawson
MS 306-388
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA 91109
USA
