Hello All,

It's been a long time since you received a PROMPT update, so I have a lot to share. Brace yourselves!

1. Phase I: Completed

2. Early Science

3. Phase II: Third Building Trip

4. Phase II: Fourth Building Trip

5. PROMPT Access

6. PROMPT Summer Fellowship Program

7. PROMPT ERIRA Scholarship Program

8. The Skynet Robotic Telescope Network

1. Phase I: Completed

At the end of the February/March 2005 building trip, we left a few temporary 14-inch Celestron telescopes deployed at the site. Over the following nine months we used them to test hardware, to test and continue to develop software, and to conduct early science until the final telescopes were ready and deployed.

RC Optical Systems completed the six final telescopes in October, all 16-inches, for a combined effective diameter of 1.0 meters. Furthermore, each mirror coating has been optimized to a different wavelength range, spanning U band through H band, and each camera coating has been optimized to a matching wavelength range.

The 16-inch RCOSs are BEAUTIFUL. You can see pictures of them and pictures from the now completed December 2005 building trip (Section 3) at:

http://www.physics.unc.edu/~reichart/promptpics.html

Our thanks and congratulations to Brad and Susan Ehrhorn and all the people at RCOS for delivering so fine a product.

We have now replaced the Celestrons with RCOSs (Section 3), which marks the successful completion of Phase I.

2. Early Science

A lot of early science took place during Phase I. The Phase I telescopes observed approximately 20 GRBs, including two on the rapid timescale:

GRB 050908: Under the control of Skynet (Section 8), two of PROMPT's temporary telescopes automatically observed the GRB localization within 50 seconds of the burst and 30 seconds of spacecraft notification, imaging in four filters, two simultaneously -- a first in the GRB field! The FUN GRB Collaboration followed up with 9.2m SALT, 8.1m Gemini South, 2.3m WIRO, etc.

GRB 051109a: Again under the control of Skynet, one of PROMPT's temporary telescopes automatically observed the GRB localization within 100 seconds of the burst and 75 seconds of spacecraft notification, imaging in two filters. The FUN GRB Collaboration followed up with 3.5m ARC, etc.

But most excitingly, using 4.1m SOAR and PROMPT together we discovered and identified the most distant explosion yet known in the universe -- GRB

050904 at a redshift of 6.29, which corresponds to when the universe was only about 6% of its current age. The paper has been accepted to Nature, and my students Josh Haislip and Melissa Nysewander are the first two authors.

Finally, in non-GRB science we ruled out a transit for the extrasolar planet identified around HD 109749, for Debra Fischer, David Charbonneau, etc. The paper has been accepted to ApJ.

3. Phase II: Third Building Trip

Melissa Nysewander, Aaron LaCluyze, Adam Crain, Kevin Ivarsen, and I returned to Chile in December 2005 for our third building trip, the primary goals of which were to assemble and bring online the five final visible-light telescopes, to make specific improvements to the robustness and remote control of the hardware, and to further develop and test Skynet, all of which we accomplished successfully.

For more pictures, all from Cluyze:

http://mrbook2.smugmug.com/gallery/1076201

Building five telescopes in three weeks is no small task, particularly given the remoteness of the location. Something as seemingly minor as a poor cable decision and the entire trip could easily have been a giant waste of time and money -- lots of money. Melissa Nysewander deserves tremendous credit for the painstaking detail that she put into the planning and execution of the trip -- the third that she has planned and the second that she has led. Well done!

More on everyone else's contributions below.

4. Phase II: Fourth Building Trip

We have now received the NIR camera from Rockwell Scientific and it too looks beautiful:

http://mrbook2.smugmug.com/gallery/1141076

We took our first test image with it in my lab today and will spend the next few months testing it thoroughly and writing software to integrate it into Skynet, after which we will schedule the next building trip.

I would like to thank Don Smith and the folks at Guilford College in nearby Greensboro for volunteering their observatory for the final tests. This will involve mating the camera to the sixth RCOS telescope, which has been specifically designed for this camera, swapping telescopes in their observatory for the tests, and then resetting their observatory once the tests are completed. We look forward to sending teams to Guilford later this semester.

Our other goal for the fourth building trip is the deployment of PROMPT's robotic polarimeter, which has been designed and is being built by Chris Clemens' Goodman Lab at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Finally, my new postdoc, Aaron LaCluyze, has agreed to plan and lead the fourth building trip, giving Melissa a well deserved break -- to write her dissertation ;)

5. PROMPT Access

Since five of the six telescopes are now built, the time has come to begin to open PROMPT up to its user community. But since the NIR and polarimetry capabilities are not yet ready, and we still have bells and whistles to add to Skynet, we plan to do this in stages:

PROMPT Collaboration institutions can have access to PROMPT's current capabilities as of now. The principal at each institution should schedule what will be an approximately one-hour phone call with me and I will show you how to queue and retrieve observations using Skynet -- it's easy!

I also recommend that representatives of the US and Chilean astronomical communities also begin tinkering with PROMPT/Skynet this semester so they can prepare solicitations for Semester 2006B.

2006A will be our last early science semester, but our first that is open to everyone. We do not plan to keep track of each institution's time this semester, unless it becomes a problem.

During 2006A, we will attempt to complete PROMPT's NIR and polarimetry capabilities, and new features that we're working on for Skynet. If successful, we will open these new capabilities to the PROMPT Collaboration institutions and representatives of the US and Chilean astronomical communities in 2006B, and add them to the US and Chilean solicitations for 2007A.

6. PROMPT Summer Fellowship Program

Thanks to an NSF CAREER grant, we are now encouraging undergraduates at PROMPT Collaboration institutions other than UNC-Chapel Hill to apply for a PROMPT Summer Fellowship. Two PROMPT Summer Fellows will be selected each year to work with my group at UNC-Chapel Hill:

http://www.physics.unc.edu/~reichart/prompt_summer_fellowship_program.html

7. PROMPT ERIRA Scholarship Program

Thanks to the same NSF CAREER grant, we are also encouraging undergraduates at PROMPT Collaboration institutions to apply to participate in Educational Research in Radio Astronomy, a one-week summer program that I have run at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank for the past 14 years. Approximately five PROMPT ERIRA Scholarships will be awarded each year, including at least one to a non-UNC-Chapel Hill student.

ERIRA 2006 dates and applications will appear shortly:

http://www.physics.unc.edu/~reichart/erira.html

8. The Skynet Robotic Telescope Network

Last but certainly not least...the future!

Some text from my web page:

"PROMPT is under the control of 'Skynet', a prioritized queue scheduling system that we are developing at UNC-Chapel Hill. Skynet is written in LabView and runs on a computer at UNC-Chapel Hill's Morehead Observatory.

Skynet interacts with MySQL databases and commands dumb-by-design 'Terminator' programs at each telescope. Images are automatically transferred back to a 1.1 terabyte RAID 5 with tape backup at Morehead Observatory, making use of communication libraries that we wrote for remote use of SOAR. Users can submit jobs and retrieve data from any location via a PHP-enabled web server that interacts with the MySQL databases.

However, GRBs receive top priority and are automatically added to the queue via a socket connection.

"Furthermore, we have written Terminator very generally, such that any mount that can be controlled by 'The Sky' and any camera that can be controlled by MaxIm DL, or mounts and cameras that are ASCOM compliant, can easily be integrated into Skynet. On this note, work is underway to integrate a few half-meter class facilities across the US this academic year, supported in part by an NSF CAREER grant. Skynet will then synchronize GRB observations across these telescopes, which makes interpreting spectral flux distributions much easier, especially if the afterglow is not fading as a power law at early times. When not chasing GRBs, which is most of the time, network members will be able to queue jobs on each other's telescopes, including PROMPT, at a guest priority level, giving them access to additional facilities and instrumentation, not to mention sky coverage and weather flexibility."

Or to put it more simply, thanks to the genius and hard work of my crack programming team -- Adam Crain, Drew Foster, and Kevin Ivarsen -- we can very easily add non-PROMPT telescopes to Skynet. Furthermore, nearly every half-meter class telescope under construction today is compatible!

Think about it...

Anyway, as proof of concept, last semester Jack Harvey put his "Trubble Terrestrial Telescope" in Colorado on Skynet. Once firewall issues had been resolved and the proper software installed, integration with Skynet only took an afternoon!

Over the following nights we put jobs on his scope, he put jobs on our scopes, and Skynet did all of the work (I slept...)

Overall, I am now working with about half a dozen people representing about a dozen telescopes that we hope to put on Skynet over the next few years.

I think even more will join in time :)

Anyway, that's it for Update #14.

More to come soon!

Dan