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Annualreport 2014 ANNUALREPORT 14 20 TABLEOFCONTENTS 1 Director’s Update 2 Trustee’s Update 3 Science Highlights 20 Technical Support Highlights 22 Development Highlights 24 Public Program Highlights 25 Putnam Collection Center Highlights 26 Peer-Reviewed Publications 29 Conference Proceedings & Abstracts 35 Statement of Financial Position DIRECTOR’SUPDATE By Jeffrey Hall 2014 marked the official our operating revenue depends, it is completion of the largest project Lowell all too easy to try to “hunker down” Observatory has ever undertaken: the and avoid the unease of change by Discovery Channel Telescope (DCT). We over-conserving human and financial declared the telescope “commissioned” resources in times of stress. — a glorified way of saying fully Therefore, throughout 2014, and debugged — on December 31, 2014, continuing as I write this in May 2015, and are planning on full science we have taken a tack of identifying operations throughout 2015. where we were mired in the common In practice, this is a somewhat non-profit mindset of trying to do fuzzy line. We still have instruments to too much with too few people or too complete, and with a facility as complex few tools to carry out our mission, as DCT, hardware and software issues and to rectify those deficiencies so will continually occur. One has to draw we can make maximum use of our the line somewhere though, and by magnificent new asset. That is still a the end of 2014 we had achieved the work in progress, but there is definitely key milestones we felt were required progress. to declare our ten-year, $53,000,000 This journey of settling Lowell journey complete. Minor issues aside, Observatory fully into its new position DCT is functioning exceptionally as the owner and operator of a state- well, and it is something of which the of-the-art, 4-meter telescope will take entire Lowell family — staff, Board, time. We are discovering, often by Trustee, institutional partners, and all experiment, how to move forward our friends and supporters — can be most efficiently as a greatly expanded justifiably proud. organization. We are pursuing, As we headed toward DCT through our new Foundation and other completion in 2014, we were already avenues, the more diversified sources looking ahead to the next journey, one of revenue we need to support our I estimate will occupy us for about the newly expanded operations and reduce next seven years. As I’ve noted before, our reliance on ever-fickle Federal adding an asset like DCT to a company funding. We are identifying both what the size of Lowell is transformative — skill sets are crucial to have on staff, culturally, operationally, and financially. and the levels of staffing required. It is We expended significant effort a cooperative effort of the entire team, throughout 2014 doing a complete and it depends crucially on the interest overhaul of our strategic plan, and support of all those who believe in producing a new plan that sets goals our mission. for science and outreach, operations, Happily, that mission is clicking and finances through 2017. Some of along. In this report, you can read these are truly fundamental, such as the about the diverse and fascinating creation of the governing principles and research our astronomers carry out documents for a new Foundation for so well, and have a glimpse into the Lowell Observatory. steadily growing and popular programs At the heart of the plan, however, is we’ve implemented to bring the results one overarching philosophy, which is of our research to the public. With our to aggressively embrace the profound new telescope for research and our change DCT is bringing upon the established reputation as a national institution. That may seem self-evident, leader in astronomy outreach, we’re but not necessarily: in the face of a working not toward just success but a steadily more difficult environment golden age. I invite all of you to come for winning the Federal grants and along on the ride with us. ■ contracts upon which some 50% of LowellLowell ObservatoryObservatory || 20142014 ANNUAL ANNUALREPORTREPORT || Director’sTrustee’s Update Update 1 TRUSTEE’SUPDATE By W. Lowell Putnam As I write this, I am getting ready The restoration of the Clark to join Jeff Hall in Washington, DC Telescope, an important part of our where we have been invited to a two- past and present, was incredibly well day conference to discuss how the done. I want to thank the team for National Science Foundation (NSF) can doing such a wonderful job. Otto be a better “partner” with non-profit Franz, who was taught to use the Clark foundations and research institutions. by E.C. Slipher when he started doing I am also just back from a day of science here in the 1950s, told me that presenting to three classes of sixth it was better than new. So we can look graders using astronomy to promote forward to many decades of sharing interest in STEM-related careers. My this instrument with the public, teaching ears are still ringing! and creating moments of engagement New Horizons is providing a great which we hope will last lifetimes. opportunity for public outreach and While these two examples (and engagement, but it also provides some there are others) may seem disjointed, interesting points of reflection. With they speak to a point that has come up Percival Lowell and Will Grundy as over the past few years. I have often bookends, and Clyde Tombaugh in the been asked how we should balance middle, we have a unique relationship the history and current research, and with the outer solar system, and one my reply is that if we keep doing good that spans a century. So perhaps it science and talking about it with the was no surprise that the New Horizons public, the history will take care of itself. team came back to Lowell to access And if we do things right, the history our 1915 plates in order to get a more will come back to help the current accurate course plan! In this case science do even more. the past was indeed prologue to the Thank you for your help and support! ■ present. Lowell Observatory | 2014 ANNUALREPORT | Trustee’s Update 2 SCIENCEHIGHLIGHTS Ted Dunham Dr. Dunham’s primary activities in 2014 were related to SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy). Dunham and his team carried out observations of a transit involving the exoplanet GJ1214b in February using the co-mounted HIPO and FLITECAM instruments in the so- called FLIPO configuration. The primary purpose of this observation was to search for evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of the planet. Transit observations are very tricky since the scientifically interesting signals are at the level of one part in 1,000 to one part in 10,000. The team is still working on the data analysis. These flights also included final commissioning observations for both FLITECAM and HIPO. Following this flight series both instruments passed their commissioning reviews for SOFIA. HIPO was developed by the instrument group at Lowell and FLITECAM by the Infrared Lab at UCLA. Later in the year the project agreed to support FLIPO observations of an occultation of a bright star by Pluto that occurs just two weeks before the New Horizons encounter with Pluto in July 2015. This observation will be part of a deployment to New Zealand in June and July of 2015. Scientifically it is valuable because Earth-based occultations probe a different altitude range in Pluto’s atmosphere than the New Horizons experiments will, and because it will help put the very brief New Horizons flyby results in the context of the scientific community’s current understanding of Pluto’s atmosphere from Earth-based occultations. Dunham is also personally gratified by this turn of events since it is exactly the kind of observation that FLIPO was designed for. This is a big payoff for all the work the team has done developing HIPO and FLITECAM since 1997! In other areas considerable progress has been made on the NIHTS instrument for the DCT. Dunham hopes to have it on the telescope by early fall of 2015. Also, his work for the TESS project based at MIT and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics began this year. TESS is an Earth- orbital survey satellite designed to discover the “best and brightest” transiting extrasolar planets for further study using other facilities. It is scheduled to launch in 2017. ■ Images (left): SOFIA in flight; (right): Dr. Dunham aboard SOFIA. Lowell Observatory | 2014 ANNUALREPORT | Science Highlights 3 SCIENCEHIGHLIGHTS Will Grundy Dr. Grundy’s research involves icy outer Solar System planets, satellites, and Kuiper belt objects, and was fully funded during 2014 by research grants from the federal government. Grundy leads projects to discover Kuiper belt binaries and to determine their mutual orbits and masses. He is also involved with observational studies of Pluto’s recently-discovered small satellites. Grundy is a co- investigator on NASA’s New Horizons mission on its way to encountering the Pluto system in 2015. He heads the mission’s surface composition science theme team. Grundy is also working on spectroscopic and thermal observations of outer Solar System bodies including Pluto, Triton, Eris, and Makemake which share possession of volatile surface ices seasonally interacting with thin atmospheres. He participated in observations from a number of large space- and ground-based telescopes including Hubble, Spitzer, Keck, SALT, Gemini, IRTF, and DCT. To complement this observational work, he does laboratory studies of cryogenic ices and ice mixtures at Northern Arizona University where numerous students seeking hands-on laboratory experience can readily contribute to the research.
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