This summer’s Roman Science Conference “Challenging Theory with Roman: From Planet Formation to Cosmology,” being hosted by the Roman Science Support Center at IPAC, will take place online and in the Baxter Lecture Hall on the Caltech campus July 9–12, 2024. The goal of this four-day conference is to bring members of the community together to discuss how observations with NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will challenge theories that range from exoplanets to the edge of the Universe. The conference will focus mainly on Roman surveys with the Wide Field Instrument, as well as on the Coronagraph Instrument. This conference will provide an active and exciting opportunity for both observers and theorists to outline the potential breakthroughs that could be enabled by the Roman mission.

Registration is open until June 25, 2024.

NExScI will host the 2024 Sagan Summer Workshop "Advances in Direct Imaging: From Young Jupiters to Habitable Earths" July 22–26, 2024. This workshop will cover the scientific questions in exoplanets motivating direct imaging and include sessions exploring basic optical principles of high-contrast imaging and the fundamentals of coronagraph and wavefront sensing technologies and high-contrast instrument design. Presentations and group exercises will cover approaches to starlight/PSF subtraction and to planet and disk recovery, determination of orbits from imaging observations, and other topics. The workshop will conclude with a look toward future facilities.

Preceding the 2024 Sagan Summer Workshop, there will be an optional add-on half-day PROTO (PROfessional Tools and Opportunities) Workshop. Geared towards the early-career community, the workshop covers the nuts and bolts of being an exoplanet astronomer, offering a how-to guide for getting exoplanet science done, rather than focusing on what the science is.

In keeping with the hybrid format, the 2024 workshop will accommodate both in-person and on-line attendees. The Sagan Summer Workshops are aimed at advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs, however, all are welcome to attend. There is no registration fee for these workshops.

Messier 78, a vibrant star nursery enveloped in interstellar dust.

Spiral galaxy NGC 6744.

The first Euclid public data release includes the full set of Early Release Observations, which took place ahead of Euclid’s main survey. These early observations targeted 17 astronomical objects, from nearby clouds of gas and dust to distant clusters of galaxies.

The NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) serves public Euclid data, starting with the Euclid Early Release Observations, as a complementary site to the ESA archive.

NASA is soliciting proposals for the "Euclid General Investigator Program (EGIP)" to support research focused on public data from Euclid, including the following areas:

1. Analysis of data or development of data analysis techniques and tools
2. Supporting observations directly relevant to Euclid science objectives that would augment the science return of the mission
3. Theoretical investigations that will advance the science return of the Euclid mission

Mandatory Notices of Intent are due July 15, 2024, and proposals are due August 22, 2024.

Euclid has begun its dark Universe survey. Over the next six years, Euclid will observe billions of galaxies across 10 billion years of cosmic history. You can follow the Euclid Survey Status daily.

For periodic updates on Euclid and related NASA funding opportunities, please sign up for the ENSCI newsletter.

A new space telescope to survey ultraviolet light across the entire sky will provide NASA with more insight into how galaxies and stars evolve. The space telescope, called UVEX (UltraViolet EXplorer), is targeted to launch in 2030 as NASA’s next Astrophysics Medium-Class Explorer mission. In addition to conducting a highly sensitive all-sky survey, UVEX will be able to quickly point toward sources of ultraviolet light in the universe, allowing it to capture the explosions that follow bursts of gravitational waves caused by merging neutron stars. The telescope also will carry an ultraviolet spectrograph to study stellar explosions and massive stars.

The mission’s principal investigator is Fiona Harrison at Caltech in Pasadena, California. IPAC will provide the UVEX Science Data Center (USDC) and IRSA will serve the data products, analysis tools, and documentation to the community. Other institutions involved in the mission include University of California at Berkeley, Northrop Grumman, and Space Dynamics Laboratory.

Read more about UVEX and NASA's Explorers Program

Selected by NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program in 2019, Lunar Trailblazer will map the distribution of the different forms of water that exist on the surface of the Moon. Lunar Trailblazer is currently scheduled to launch as a secondary satellite with the Intuitive Machines (IM-2) mission later in 2024. The mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and its mission operations are based at Caltech/IPAC.

The SPHEREx observatory in the horizontal position, showing all three layers of the photon shields and the telescope. Image captured by BAE Systems, courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. More information about SPHEREx assembly can be found here.

Development of the SPHEREx data pipeline, which will produce the archival data products of calibrated images, data cubes and spectra, continues at IPAC. Recent work includes incorporation of detector test results and a new link between JPL and IPAC to transfer telemetry and reports during operations. Full end-to-end data flow and processing tests will happen later this summer.

The NASA Keck Time observing call for 2025A will be announced by early August with an anticipated submission due date of September 12, 2024. Updated information about the 2025A call will be posted to NExScI's KSA web page.

The NASA Exoplanet Archive released three new major services: improved plotting capabilities for presenting data in the Planetary Systems and Planetary Systems Composite tables with scatter plots and histograms, the new interactive Stellar Hosts Table that provides a single access point to all stellar parameters of stars in systems with confirmed planets that are in the archive, and the Atmospheric Spectroscopy Table, which serves spectral data in a unified interface to enable easier exoplanet characterization studies. The archive has also added several contributed data sets ranging from host star chemical abundances to exozodiacal dust levels.

ExoFOP, a complementary service to the Exoplanet Archive that enables community sharing of observations and data for stellar and exoplanet systems, released a dedicated table of stars likely to be targets for the Habitable Worlds Observatory. Additionally, the ExoFOP now enables users to customize the views and filtering of the tables and save these as user table preferences.

A Milky Way plane survey was the top-ranked submission following a 2021 call for Roman survey ideas. The scientific community will work together to design the observational program ahead of Roman’s launch by May 2027. Read more about the plans for the Milky Way Plane Roman Survey.

• Roman Imaging Optics tested together for the first time
• Plans to measure stellar rotation periods with Roman
• Plans to hunt gravitationally lensed supernovae with Roman
• The Roman Coronagraph Instrument shipped from JPL to Goddard

A new version of IRSA Viewer and related tools (Time Series Tool, Data Collection Explorer, Catalog Search Tool, Data Discovery [the box on the IRSA front page], IRTF, and Atlas) has been released. This version changes the look and feel of the tool, modernizing it and updating the icons. The same functionality is there, and now dark mode is supported! The online help has been completely updated—there is a help page called "Quick Start for the Impatient" if you are an expert and just want to see the new stuff. Likewise, this video just calls out the new features. More tools (and movies) will be updated to reflect this new look in the coming months.

• IRSA has added more data to the cloud, with more planned. There are Python notebooks with examples as well. More information can be found here.
• The Euclid ERO release is available at IRSA. More information can be found here.
• The NEOWISE-R 2024 data release included ~2.5 million image sets and ~18.4 billion source detections from the 10th year of NEOWISE-R. More information can be found here.
• The ZTF Data Releases 20 and 21 each released more than ~53 million images, ~820 billion source detections, and ~4.8 billion light curves. More information can be found here.
• IRSA accepts contributed enhanced data sets from the community. The newest releases include IC 417 and SMC-Last.

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

• Subscribe to our newsletter.
• Follow us on social media: Facebook, Bluesky, or YouTube.

More IRSA news

This spring the NED team released updates to the Gravitational Wave Follow-up (GWF) service to facilitate searches for electromagnetic counterparts of events from the fourth observing run (O4) of the International Gravitational-Wave Observatory Network (IGWN). The interface provides better organization of GW events, a band representing the Galactic plane in the all-sky images, and improvements to the probability densities computed to rank host galaxy candidates. On April 22, the service responded to IGWN event S240422ed by cross-matching with galaxies in the NED Local Volume Sample (Cook et al. 2023) and automatically generating a 3D cross-match of the sky localization in less than two minutes. The event was likely a neutron star–black hole merger at a distance of 188 ±43 Mpc. Within 30 minutes of the GW notification, the top 20 host galaxy candidates were also published by the NED team in NASA's General Coordinates Network (GCN) Circular 36235.

NED released an update featuring 67,000 new sources from the literature, cross-identified with previous NED objects, in addition to more than 21,000 new objects. The release also included 162,000 new redshifts, which increased the number of objects having at least one redshift measurement by more than 24,000. In addition, nearly 172,000 new object links were added to over 800 new references. Currently over 9 million objects have at least one redshift measurement in NED.

For more information and other news, please visit the NED website.

KOA has released data from the “Exploring the Compositional Diversity of Small Exoplanets from K2” project by PI A. Howard. This data set contains 2332 radial velocity and activity measurements for 84 stars and a table of derived stellar properties for 440 stars. The extracted HIRES spectra used for these tables are also available.

After more than four decades of dedicated service to IPAC, 25 years of which he was serving as IPAC Executive Director, George Helou announced he is stepping down from the role at the end of the year. “I have decided to continue as IPAC Executive Director until the end of this calendar year and then rotate off after that. The organization is healthy. The future is as promising as it has ever been." Helou, who has made major contributions to our understanding of galaxy evolution and star formation, will stay on at Caltech as a Research Professor of Physics, a role he has maintained since 1998.

Under Helou’s careful stewardship, IPAC grew and evolved from its early role as a data processing center for IRAS to supporting more than 20 missions and projects. Helou has been recognized by his colleagues and governments with several awards and honors, including the Gruber Cosmology Prize, a NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, a NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, and the Coat of Arms of the Presidency of the Republic of Lebanon for “a distinguished career in astronomy.” He will remain connected to the IPAC community as a researcher and advisor.

Caltech's Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy Division (PMA) is assembling a committee to conduct an international search for a new Executive Director, with the goal of having a successor in place during the transition period. The search team will include representation from various stakeholders, and the search is open to both internal and external candidates.

Dr. David Ciardi was named the new Deputy Director of NExScI. He succeeds Dr. Dawn Gelino, who has joined JPL as the Exoplanet Program Manager.

In his new role, Ciardi will assist the DIrector's Office.

The current list of jobs available at IPAC is maintained at our job opportunities page.

“Explore Exoplanets: The Discoverers” is a new podcast series featuring Dr. Jessie Christiansen, Chief Scientist of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) and lead scientist of NASA’s Exoplanet Archive, as she interviews astronomers who have had that incredible “Eureka!” moment of discovering a planet outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. The podcast is available on YouTube, where it has garnered more than 24,000 views since the inaugural episode was released in September 2023.

Each interview is presented in two episodes, with part one covering the interviewee’s journey to becoming an astronomer and the circumstances leading to their exoplanet discovery. The episode closes with the astronomer revealing their favorite fictional planet. Part two continues the fictional planet conversation, with Jessie describing the closest current real-world counterpart from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. To date, these fictional planets have come from books and movies ranging from Lord of the Rings to Star Wars to The Stormlight Archive. This approach has provided some great discussion between Jessie and her guests about what makes a planet suitable for life and the scientific realism (or not!) within the science fiction and fantasy genres.

All the previous episodes have been archived on the show's website. There is also an audio-only version available on Apple and Google Podcasts. Additional new episodes will be coming soon.

NITARP Continues to Educate Teachers and Students

NITARP sent ~50 people to the AAS meeting in New Orleans, LA, in January 2024. The 2023 class (and their students) presented five posters, and the 2024 class got started on their projects. A few self-funded alumni came to the meeting too! Here is an article about the New Orleans meeting.

All the AAS-related NITARP posters are linked here, along with quotes from people (reload to get a new set of quotes). The 2024 teams will be visiting IPAC this summer to get into their research in earnest.

The application for the 2025 NITARP class is due in September 2024. The application instructions are linked from here.