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D.L. Huestis, P.C. Cosby, T.G. Slanger (SRI)
The Applied Information Systems Research program of NASA's Office of Space Science has indicated its plan to fund SRI's proposal for establishment of the National Virtual Aeronomical Observatory (NVAO).
Astronomers' echelle spectrographs are already recording high-resolution survey spectra of optical emissions from excited atoms and molecules in the Earth's night atmosphere, during every hour of every night at numerous locations world-wide. Since 1997 SRI researchers, under support from NSF's Atmospheric Sciences Division, have been finding atmospheric surprises in a small subset of the potentially available sky spectra, collected from a few collaborating astronomers using the Keck telescopes.
The NVAO will collect such spectra and make them available to all atmospheric scientists, in standardized formats, with appropriate access and inquiry tools. Students and researchers will be able to perform ``observations" on the ``real atmosphere" from their desktops, either as educational exercises, as publishable research, or as ``dry run" experiments before taking the field.
We seek to identify astronomers who might be willing to donate sky spectra. We also want to learn about other telescope and spectrograph capabilities and operations, especially wavelength and intensity calibration and archiving.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://www-mpl.sri.com/NVAO/docs/flyer.html. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: david.huestis@sri.com
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.