CEDAR email: Arecibo Call for Proposals (ISR Observations): Thursday, March 2, 2017 Deadline.

Wed Feb 8 10:56:08 MST 2017

Arecibo Call for Proposals (ISR Observations): Thursday, March 2, 2017
Deadline.

Dear Colleagues

(Please distribute this call to any colleagues who might be interested)

We extend an invitation for proposals for the use of the 430MHz Incoherent
Scatter Radar with a deadline for March 2, 2017 (17:00 AST, 21:00 UTC).
These petitions should be for the usage of the Incoherent Scatter Radar
(ISR), as well for the passive and active optical instruments. These
requests should be for radar usage within the six-month (or in some cases
one-year) beginning July 1, 2017. Once the request is submitted and
accepted, the same would be valid for six-month (or a year depending on the
request), after which it will need to be re-submitted to maintain validity.
This call does NOT include proposals for use of the HF Facility for
ionospheric modification.

Information about observing proposals and policies can be found at
http://www.naic.edu/~astro/proposals/ao_proposal_guide.shtml. Proposals must
be submitted using the web-based cover form, which can be found online at
http://www.naic.edu/~astro/proposals/aoprop.php. For this deadline we have
enabled direct uploading of the PDF containing the main body of your
proposal via the proposal website.

Technical information about our facilities and instrumentation as well as
the contacts for specific support are found below. For any further
information not addressed in this communication you can contact Christiano
G.M. Brum (cbrum at naic.edu).

We hope to obtain your proposals real soon and continue to do outstanding
research during the upcoming year as we have done in the past.

Sincerely,

Christiano G.M. Brum

Technical information.

The 430 MHz Incoherent Scatter Radar.

The 430 MHz Incoherent Scatter Radar (ISR) is capable of extremely sensitive
diagnostics of the ionosphere. Power from the pulsed 2.5 MW (currently about
1.3 to 1.5 MW) transmitter can be split with arbitrary ratio into two beams,
allowing sensing through the observing region simultaneously with sensing
outside of it or near its edge. Possible geometries are set by the locations
of the two feeds on opposite sides of the rotatable azimuth arm, with the
minimum zenith angle differences set by the physical sizes of the feeds. Raw
data can be collected with a 25 MHz wide data taking system for later
analysis while a narrower bandwidth system is used to provide on line
monitoring. The current coding technique allows 300 m range resolution on
the enhanced plasma line while ion line and natural plasma line data are
also recorded from the same radar pulses. There some restrictions in
simultaneous viewing resulting from the extremely high signal power in the
enhanced plasma line. For further information you can contact Michael Sulzer
(msulzer at naic.edu).

Optical capability.

At Arecibo we have a variety of airglow and lidar instrumentation.
Presently, airglow sensing equipment includes two Tilting-Filter
Photometers, three Fabry-Perot Interferometers, and All-sky Imagers. These
instruments are located about 1000 feet from the center of the incoherent
scatter radar.

The "active" optical instruments (lidars) have the capability to monitor the
upper stratosphere to lower thermosphere. We have three systems, two of
which are configurable to monitor one each of the meteoric metals: Na, Fe,
Ca, or Ca+. Alternatively, one of the two metal lidars can be configured as
a Rayleigh lidar to measure temperature from the upper stratosphere to the
mesosphere, from about 35 to 70 km. The third lidar is a Doppler-resonance
lidar that measures temperatures within the metal layer by sensing the
Doppler broadening in the D1 resonance line of K.

Request for optical instrument support for ISR experiments must be included
in the proposal. We encourage the PIs to contact our staff for special
optical configurations and further information: Jonathan Friedman
(jonathan at naic.edu), Shikha Raizada (shikha at naic.edu), or Jens Lautenbach
(jlautenbach at naic.edu).

Arecibo Observatory Remote Optical Facility (AO-ROF).

The AO-ROF is located on Culebra Island (18o 18' 18"N; 65o 18' 05"W), Puerto
Rico, about 96 miles east of the Arecibo Observatory. The design of the
facility enables it to host two optical instruments requiring large domes
(5-ft diameter) and four optical instruments that require smaller domes
(1-ft diameter). Exterior space is also available for the installation of
radio receivers or other kinds of instrumentation.

For further information you can contact Pedrina Santos (pterra at naic.edu) or
Eva Robles (erobles at naic.edu).

______________________________________________

Christiano Garnett Marques Brum

Deputy Director for Space and Atmospheric Sciences 

Arecibo Observatory

Advanced Technology & Systems Division

SRI International

HC3 BOX 53995, Arecibo PR 00612 

787-878-2612x242

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