March 2015
Issue 67
Asian-Oceanian Geoscience Society (AOGS)
Annual meeting
Singapore, 2 - 7 August 2015
http://www.asiaoceania.org/society/index.asp
Abstracts due is extended! Now it is 28 February 2105
We kindly invite you to attend the AOGS-2015 meeting
and participate in the following sessions:
Session PS03: Polarimetry of Planetary
Systems: Observations, Theory and Models
Polarimetry is currently enjoying a rejuvenation in various astronomical
applications. As a complementary techinque
to imaging and spectroscopy,
polarization allows the investigation of scatttering
properties of variety of media ranging from planetary atmospheres, comets,
small bodies (planetary
satellites, asteroids, Kuiper Belt objects, etc.) to detection and
characterization of exoplanets, brown dwarfs, star and planet forming regions;
characterization of magnetic fields and search for optically active molecules
in a search for habitability elsewhere than our earth. We invite contributions
from observers, modellers,
laboratory measurements, instrument designers and missions. We anticipate half
to one day of presentations including oral and poster contributions.
Session PS04: Comets, Asteroids and
Other Small Bodies of the Solar System: From 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko to Chariklo
The composition and physical properties of Small Solar System Bodies (SSSBs),
remnants of the formation of planets, are key to better understand
our solar system. Increased knowledge of their surface properties and their
potential as resources are also necessary to prepare for robotic and human
exploration. Missions such as ESA/Rosetta, ESA/Gaia, NASA/OSIRIS-Rex,
JAXA/Hyabusa-2, NASA/Dawn and NASA/New Horizons, to study asteroids, comets,
dwarf planets and TNOs are poised to provide new information on SSSBs. This
session welcomes abstracts on the remarkable results bringing
information on the internal structure and composition of SSSBs based on space
and ground-based data, numerical models, as well as instrument/mission
concepts in the prospect of future exploration, including Rosetta/67P, C/SidingSpring, C/2014 Q1, C/2012
K1, Chariklo, Ceres, Vesta.. We anticipate
a half-day to a full day session.
Meeting:
Radiation mechanisms of astrophysical objects: classics today
St.Petersburg, Russia, September 21-25, 2015
Studies of radiation mechanisms and processes of
spectra formation in astrophysical objects are among the fundamental tasks of
modern astrophysics. A powerful tool for the solution of these problems is
provided by the theory of radiative transfer, which has been substantially
contributed to and developed by the full member of the Soviet (Russian) Academy
of Sciences Victor Victorovich
Sobolev. The Sobolev method to solve the
radiative transfer equations, among his numerous results in the field of
radiative transfer, became classical nowadays. In 1947-1998 V.V. Sobolev was the head of the Chair
of Astrophysics of the Leningrad/St. Petersburg State University and a leader
of the Leningrad/St. Petersburg astrophysical school, which had won
international recognition for many valuable results.
The 100th birthday anniversary of V.V. Sobolev will be celebrated on
September 2, 2015. On this occasion the Saint-Petersburg State University
organizes an international conference
Radiation mechanisms of astrophysical objects: classics today
which will be held in St. Petersburg from September, 21 to September, 25, 2015.
The conference will highlight recent advances in the field of interests of V.V.
Sobolev. The conference
will include plenary sessions with review talks by internationally recognized
Russian and foreign scientists and a memorial session. It will continue with
parallel sessions on:
- radiative transfer theory,
- physics of interstellar
medium,
- physics of stellar and
planetary atmospheres,
- high energy astrophysics
at which original results in various branches of modern
astrophysics will be presented.
Key dates
1 March 2015 - Registration and abstract submission
open
31 July 2015 - Registration and abstract submission
deadline
21 September 2015 - Conference opens
25 September 2015 - Conference closes
For details
see http://www.astro.spbu.ru/sobolev100/?q=en/node/17
Light-scattering
software
A new FORTRAN program is available for the
computation of polarized bidirectional reflectance of a semi-infinite
homogeneous slab composed of sparsely distributed, arbitrarily shaped, randomly
oriented particles. The program is based on a numerically exact solution of the
vector radiative transfer equation. The following web site provides access to
the program and an accompanying detailed user guide: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/mmishchenko/brf/
Please address your comments and questions to Michael Mishchenko at michael.i.mishchenko at nasa.gov
New experimental feature of ADDA: an
ability to use rectangular dipoles - volume elements with the shape of
rectangular parallelepipeds (instead of the default cubes). If you plan to
simulate very oblate or prolate particles, when the smallest dimension is much
smaller than the wavelength (e.g. needles or sheets), then I encourage you to
try it out. The acceleration can be up to 100 times.
The
code is available at the branch http://code.google.com/p/a-dda/source/browse/branches/rectangular_dipole
, so you have to compile it yourself. The only documentation so far is the
recently published paper: Smunev
DA, Chaumet PC, Yurkin
MA. Rectangular dipoles in the discrete dipole approximation.
J. Quant. Spectrosc. Radiat. Transfer 2015;156:67-79.
which apart from in-depth
technical and theoretical discussion contains a brief description of how to use
the new feature together with simulation examples. PDF of the paper is freely
available for 50 days through http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1QZzd564S3Gm~
, and after that at
http://sites.google.com/site/yurkin/publications/papers/Smunev%20et%20al.%20-%202015%20-%20Rectangular%20dipoles%20in%20the
20discrete%20dipole%20approxi.pdf
If
you have any questions, feel free to use adda-discuss
group, or submit an issue to the issue tracker (from Maxim Yurkin).