Affiliation
None
Tue, 12/07/2021 - 22:34
Has anyone from AAVSO reached out to the JWST team to see how we can assist with exoplanet work? JWST will be launched very soon so now is the time to open up communications with them and begin to map out how such coordination can work. Hopefully we can set up a connection similar to the one we have now with TESS.
Ed,
An example of collaboration with the JWST mission was the call for last evening's observations of HD 80606b. You may have seen the AAVSO Alert on this.
The JWST mission will be different from that with TESS for the following reason. TESS was an all-sky survey that required extensive ground-based, follow-up observations to help confirm TESS-detected transit events as being true exoplanet transits vs. false positives. JWST, on the other hand, will be a much more targeted mission that will attempt to characterize the atmosphere of a select set of already-confirmed exoplanets. Thus, ground-based observations will be helpful in refining the transit midpoint of such targets, such as the case with HD 80606b, so that JWST can more accurately conduct its observation (in the near-infrared) at the optimal time. I suspect more calls for observations such as HD 80606b will be issued by individual researchers as the JWST mission progresses and we, the AAVSO, will issue observation alerts to support them.
Dennis Conti
It sounds like there will continue to be a need for ground based exoplanet observations, which is good news.
Ed
Could visit this site. This is the NASA/JPL exoplanet citizen scientist effort that collaborates with AAVSO for light curve and transit data harvesting. We have a twice monthly meeting. The recent campaign for HD 80606 was requested by astronomers creating proposals for JWST I believe. Lots of active members. They have a light curve reduction tool that is still a work in progress. Many of us submit our data to AAVSO exoplanet data base which is scrubbed twice a week by the NASA/JPL project.
Bryan
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exoplanet-watch/about-exoplanet-watch/overview/