We are looking forward to seeing you in New Orleans! IPAC will have a vibrant presence at the 243rd meeting of the AAS in New Orleans, LA, held January 7–11, 2024. Look for us at the Caltech/IPAC/NExScI booth (#615), with NEXScI, NED, IRSA and representatives from across IPAC projects available to help you. Several talks, posters and workshops will be given by IPAC scientists. Follow our activities at https://www.ipac.caltech.edu/page/aas243.

In 2023 we celebrated 40 years of space-based infrared astronomy. The road to JWST was paved by pioneering infrared space telescopes, most prominently the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) and the Spitzer Space Telescope, both with strong Caltech/IPAC involvement.

Forty years ago, on January 25, 1983, IRAS was launched and became the first space telescope to make a comprehensive, reliable survey of the sky at infrared wavelengths of light. IRAS’s infrared wavelengths gave it the ability to peer deep into clouds of gas and dust obscured at visible wavelengths, to study extremely cold objects, and to study objects in the distant universe. The IRAS dataset resides at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA).

20 years ago, on August 25, 2003, the Spitzer Space Telescope (then Space Infrared Telescope Facility or SIRTF) was launched, building on and expanding the heritage of the IRAS and ISO infrared space telescope missions. Spitzer revealed previously hidden features of known cosmic objects and led to discoveries and insights spanning from our own solar system to nearly the edge of the universe. The Spitzer dataset also resides at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA).

Read this article to learn more about IRAS and Spitzer and the ongoing discoveries enabled by them. See this video for more information about IRAS and the founding of IPAC!

On November 7, 2023, the first Euclid science images were released by ESA. The new images include wide-area views of a large cluster of thousands of distant galaxies, two nearby galaxies, a globular cluster, and the famous Horsehead Nebula. The images demonstrate the great potential for new science with Euclid’s large field of view and its high spatial resolution optical+near-infrared capabilities. Keep up with the latest Euclid news at the ENSCI website (https://euclid.caltech.edu).

Please join us at a Special Session at the January AAS  to hear an overview of Euclid and opportunities for archival research with Euclid’s public data releases.

Lunar Trailblazer will map the distribution of the different forms of water that exist on the surface of the Moon using two instruments, the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3) and the Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM). That will improve our understanding of the lunar water cycle and inform future human missions as to where supplies of water may be found and extracted as a resource. The mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and its mission operations are based at Caltech/IPAC.

It is now possible to interactively explore the targets that LTB will be observing on the Moon.

On Friday December 1 and Sunday December 3 the Mission Operations Team successfully conducted the first two tests of the Ground Data System connecting to the Deep Space Network.

The SPHEREx telescope and detectors will stay cold in space with the help of three "V-groove" radiators, seen here at the bottom of the telescope.

Built by Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, the telescope arrived in May at Caltech in Pasadena, California, where it was integrated with the detectors and the V-groove radiator. Then, at JPL, engineers secured it to a vibration table that simulates the shaking that the telescope will endure on the rocket ride to space. After that, it went back to Caltech, where scientists confirmed its mirrors are still in focus following the vibration testing. Read more about how the key elements are coming together for NASA’s SPHEREx mission.

The SPHEREx team at IPAC continued development of the science data pipeline, which will produce the archival data products of calibrated images, data cubes and spectra.  Recent progress included successful tests to transfer science data from the Near Space Network to IPAC via the cloud.

More than 100 exoplanet scientists attended the 5^th ExSoCal meeting in December.

On December 11–12, NExScI and Caltech hosted ExSoCal 2023, the fifth gathering of southern California exoplanet scientists. In addition to Caltech, IPAC/NExScI, and JPL scientists, colleagues from all southern California institutions were invited to attend. ExSoCal gives area scientists the chance to meet and collaborate in person on the most recent advances in exoplanet science.

Each year NExScI hosts the Sagan Summer Workshop, a week-long tutorial-based workshop that explores a timely exoplanet topic. The topic of the July 22–26, 2024 workshop is "Advances in Direct Imaging: From Young Jupiters to Habitable Earths." The workshop includes many scheduled networking opportunities among attendees and experts in the field, along with hands-on data and software/tool sessions, in-person and virtual posters, and poster pops. Participants can join either in-person on the Caltech campus or online and there is no registration fee; registration and further information will be available in mid-February 2024.

NExScI at IPAC has partnered with GSFC and other university institutions to develop the infrastructure necessary to conduct an exoplanet transit survey with the Roman Galactic Bulge survey. The NExScI component is led by co-Is David Ciardi and Jessie Christiansen. The Roman Galactic Bulge survey, designed to find exoplanets through microlensing, will also detect tens of thousands of transiting exoplanets — these transiting exoplanets can be used to study demographics of exoplanets in various galactic environments and the multi-band Roman observations may be used to characterize potential planets. This program will develop simulated data products and the tools necessary to identify and verify transiting exoplanets in the dense environment viewed towards the Galactic Bulge. All data and tools will be made available to the public in preparation for the Roman operations. The program also contains a strong diversity and inclusiveness component to engage local community college students.

NExScI will be at the IPAC/NExScI Exhibit booth at the January AAS meeting in New Orleans! Come by and visit us to find out what observing time, meeting, and data access opportunities we have for the community, and ask any questions you may have!

Staff from the Roman Science Support Center (SSC) will be at the IPAC exhibit booth at the 243rd AAS Meeting in New Orleans in January, to answer your questions about Roman and SSC activities. Come by and visit us!

Also, be sure not to miss the AAS splinter session organized by the SSC, "Maximizing the Science of Roman with Simulations," on Tuesday January 9th, 2024 at 2 pm CST, in Rooms 240/241.

Save the dates for the next Roman Science Conference, "How Roman Observations Will Confront Theory," on the Caltech campus and online, July 9–12, 2024.

The NEOWISE mission celebrated its 10th anniversary of operations on December 13, 2023. NEOWISE uses the reactivated WISE spacecraft to survey the sky in infrared light to detect, track, and characterize small bodies in the solar system. During the 10 years of operations, NEOWISE has observed the full sky over 20 times, and has reported over 193,000 asteroid and comet tracklets to the IAU Minor Planet Center. IPAC serves as the NEOWISE Science Data Center and is responsible for processing and archiving the survey data. NEOWISE image and extracted source data are served to the community by the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive. The next release of NEOWISE data is scheduled for March 2024 and will include the images and source data from the 10^th year of operations.

Orbital decay due to atmospheric drag will lead to a natural end to the NEOWISE mission in the near-future. Survey operations are scheduled to end in July of 2024, and spacecraft re-entry is predicted to occur a few months later. A final data release will take place in November of that year. By mission end, the survey will have collected data for twenty times longer than the original WISE mission, and enabled thousands of planetary science and astrophysics investigations at infrared wavelengths.

IRSA now offers 400 TB of imaging data and nearly 200 billion rows of catalog data in the cloud through the NASA Open-Source Science Initiative and the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program. WISE and Spitzer SEIP data are available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 buckets. Images are available in FITS format and Catalogs are available as Parquet files. More information is available at https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/cloud_access/.

• IRSA accepts contributed enhanced data sets from the community. The newest releases include Herschel ULIRG Survey (HERUS), Extension of HOPS out to 500 ParSecs (eHOPS), and Spitzer/IRAC Candidate YSOs (SPICY).
• We have also released new data from the Zwicky Transient Facility: The nineteenth public data release from ZTF contains approximately 50.6 million images, 787 billion source detections extracted from these images, and 4.72 billion light curves.

There are lots of ways for you to keep up with developments at IRSA:

• Subscribe to our newsletter.
• We will be at the AAS, in the IPAC booth, all week. Please come ask for a demo!
• New movies appear in the IRSA YouTube feed often; keep an eye on the IRSA Facebook page for individual video and data release notifications. 
• IRSA is now on Bluesky social media! Please give us a follow if you are too.
• It is not too late to have your opinion count! Share your opinion about our data and services here.

In 2023 the NED team integrated data from more than 3,300 peer-reviewed journal articles.

NED made its first release based on a major reworking of the data system infrastructure, including recent updates to equipment, network, database structure, query software, and the user interface (UI). In addition to many upgrades "under the hood," the UI provides streamlined results, including more compact data presentations and improvements to column labeling for coordinates, redshifts, and diameters; more improvements are in progress. Additional information is available at the NED website.

The NED team published a new article "Completeness of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database Local Volume Sample" providing physical quantities and redshift completeness useful in many science applications such as follow-up of gravitational wave events.

The paper "Best Practices for Data Publication in the Astronomical Literature" led by the NED team is having rapid take-up by the community, with links in instructions to authors at major journals and citations in three recent journal articles advising researchers on writing their science papers. NED staff members will give a workshop on the Best Practices at the upcoming 243rd AAS meeting, and they will be at the IPAC exhibit booth to answer questions and give demos.

Ariel, an ESA mission under development with a CASE (Contribution to ARIEL Spectroscopy of Exoplanets, PI Mark Swain at JPL) instrument that provides the optical and near-infrared (0.5–2 micron) science capabilities and fine guidance sensors, will be used to observe the chemical makeup of distant extrasolar planets. Ariel has passed this year a major milestone, Payload Preliminary Design Review (PDR). This means that the mission's payload design meets all the required technical and scientific specifications, and no showstoppers were found for the launch anticipated in 2029.

Public image of Jupiter in the HIRES Slit guide camera. Two slits are shown as the black bars. Image acquired on 2023-11-22 by PI Schmidt.

KOA has begun ingesting and serving guider images from all active instruments at the W. M. Keck Observatory. Currently, KOA serves 33,00 guider images acquired over 57 nights; 346 of these images are already public.

IPAC scientists have important roles in several of the Roman Space Telescope Project Infrastructure Teams, including

• Roman Galaxy Redshift Survey (GRS-PIT; PI Yun Wang, Co-Is James Colbert, Harry Teplitz and Greg Walth and Collaborators Anahita Alavi, Phil Appleton and Kevin McCarthy);
• Roman Alerts Promptly from Image Differencing (RAPID-PIT, Co-Is Ben Rusholme, Schuyler van Dyk, Roberta Paladini and Joe Masiero);
• Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey (RGES-PIT; Co-Is Charles Beichman, Sean Carey, Sebastiano Calchi–Novati, Etienne Bachelet and Jessie Christiansen).
• A Roman Project Infrastructure Team to Support Cosmological Measurements with Type Ia Supernovae (SN-PIT, Collaborator Schuyler van Dyk)
• Maximizing Cosmological Science with the Roman High Latitude Imaging Survey (Co-I Daniel Masters)

IPACers also have representation among the selected Roman Wide Field Science (WFS) teams. Both the PIT and the WFS teams will make preparations to maximize the science that will come from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

About 60 staff, scientists, and visitors attended the 13th annual Greater IPAC Information Technology Symposium (GRITS) on September 22 to share and learn about the creative solutions and processes IPAC technologists employ to support NASA’s missions and science centers. Highlights included a presentation in which a ruler and yoga ball were used to demonstrate how the Lunar Trailblazer satellite will scan the moon’s surface to measure the presence and abundance of water

In keeping with the original spirit of GRITS, which is to dedicate a day to sharing information and getting better acquainted with colleagues, the event was 100% in person. This year’s theme, “13 Billion Years of GRITS” referred to the symposium’s 13th anniversary and the age of the universe.

The twenty-third annual Greater IPAC Science Symposium (GISS) was held August 31–September 1, 2023. The Symposium was given in a hybrid format so that audiences could participate both in person and via Zoom. Over 30 people attended the meeting in person and over 40 on Zoom on average during the two days. The theme for this year’s GISS was the Euclid mission and the first year of scientific results from JWST. These significant astronomy milestones were covered by our invited speakers. The Euclid talks covered the successful launch of Euclid, Euclid science, and how IPAC contributes to data calibration, archiving, and science preparation. As for JWST, we learned about multiple programs with IPAC scientist Principal Investigators, ranging from the local to the high-redshift universe. The highlights of the contributed talks included a concept study of an interferometer on the Moon, imaging the galactic plane with the Roman Space Telescope, and a presentation on the Palomar Radial Velocity Instrument.

We are starting to new series on the IPAC web pages called "Meet the Staff" where we will highlight who the people at IPAC are. Read the story of our inaugural featured scientist Dr. Federico Marocco!

Science visualization is a key component of astronomy communications both for the research and outreach communities. Recently, several exciting steps have been taken to better connect practitioners of "AstroViz" (a nickname for the discipline), spanning researchers, educators, developers, and artists. This work is being co-facilitated by NASA’s Universe of Learning, of which IPAC is a founding partner.

NITARP AT THE 243rd AAS MEETING

We have many posters planned for the AAS meeting from the 2023 class, most of which are planned for Monday's iPoster sessions. The posters will also be printed out and displayed at the IPAC booth on Tuesday. Please come ask these young scientists good questions because they have worked really hard!

We will announce the 2024 NITARP class at the AAS meeting!