Project Summary
Project Description

Introduction

Table 1: TIE Telescopes

Motivation
Scope of Work

Task 1: Scheduler
Task 2: VTIE Library

A. Active Data Archive

Figure 1: VTIE System Architecture

B. Resources
C. Tools and Services
D. On-line Proposal Review
E. VTIE Student Ap. J.

Schedule and Management Plan
Partnerships and Roles

The NASA-sponsored Telescopes In Education (TIE, http://tie.jpl.nasa.gov) project has been wildly successful in engaging the K-12 education community in real-time, hands-on, interactive astronomy activities. Hundreds of schools in the US, Australia, Canada, England, and Japan have participated in the TIE program, remotely controlling the 24-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory from their classrooms. In recent years, several (approximately 20 to date) other telescopes have been, or are in the process of being, outfitted for remote use as TIE affiliates. We propose to integrate these telescopes seamlessly into one virtual observatory and to provide the services required to operate this facility, including a scheduling service, tools for data manipulation, an online proposal review environment, an online "Virtual TIE Student Ap J" for publication of results, and access to related educational materials provided by the TIE community. This effort will leverage ongoing projects of the collaborators to increase access to astronomy education at the K-12 and undergraduate levels, especially among traditionally under-served communities. Results of this effort will also be used to enhance ongoing educational efforts in astronomy and computer science. This proposal is a collaborative effort among the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Tennessee State University, the Telescopes in Education Foundation, Raytheon ITSS, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, submitted jointly with a proposal to the EU from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and in cooperation with Rochester Institute of Technology and TIE project affiliates at Little Thompson Observatory and Howard University.

Project Description

Introduction: The Telescopes in Education (TIE) Community

The original Telescopes in Education (TIE) project began in 1992 with NASA funding. The first telescope to participate in the TIE project was the 24-inch at the Mount Wilson Observatory, coming online in 1993, and since that time, students from hundreds of schools in the US, Australia, Canada, England, and Japan have remotely controlled the telescope from their classrooms. To help teachers and students understand what they are doing and how to do it, the TIE project and members of the growing TIE community have developed a suite of guidebooks, sample projects and lesson plans (see http://tie.jpl.nasa.gov). Recently, the TIE project spun-off from JPL forming the non-profit (501c3) TIE Foundation. Mr. Gilbert Clark, president of the TIE Foundation and founder of the TIE project, is a collaborator on this proposal.

TIE has been tremendously successful as a pioneer in robotic observatory technology, as demonstrated by the many awards it has won over the years for its activities using the Mount Wilson Observatory. TIE now stands on the brink of an incredible new phase in its design and operations, providing the opportunity to significantly increase its impact on astronomy education throughout the world. Over the past few years, some 20+ observatories have been outfitted with TIE standard hardware and software interfaces by Tom Melsheimer of Meridian Controls (Table 1). [Mr. Melsheimer is also President of the Little Thompson Science Foundation which operates the Little Thompson Observatory, a cooperating partner in this proposal].

Table 1: TIE Telescopes
 

Committed	Capable	Under Construction
Mt. Wilson (Pasadena, CA) 24"	Berkshire School (Sheffield, MA) 12"	Howard University (Beltsville, MD), 30"
Mt. Wilson (Pasadena, CA) 14"	Pacific Lutheran University (Tacoma, WA), 16"	Dexter School (Brookline, MA), 24"
Little Thompson Observatory (Berthoud, CO) 18"	Gray Fox Sky Ranch Observatory (Phoenix, AR) 14"	Las Companas Observatory #1 (Chile) 14"
Fernbank Science Center (Atlanta, GA) 36"	Virginia Tech Observatory (Blacksburg, VA) 14"	Las Companas Observatory #2 (Chile) 14"
Howard University (Beltsville, MD), 30" (coming soon!)	Eastern College Observatory (St. Davids, PA), 16"	Las Companas Observatory (Chile) 24"
Iran 14"	Melton Observatory (Columbia, SC), 16"	Brisbane, Australia 14"
Turkey 14"	Pomona College (Claremont, CA), 14"
	Rattlesnake Mountain Observatory (Kennewick, WA), 24"
	Wayne State Observatory (Detroit, MI), 14"
	Miramon Kutxaespacio de la Ciencia Observatory, (Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain), 14"

Presently, these telescopes operate as 20 independent observatories with little leverage of resources, communication, or coordination. Through this proposal, we will take advantage of the tremendous synergistic potential of an international network of professional-grade, remotely accessible observatories.

Motivation

Location, Location, Location: During late 1985 & early 1986, Halley's Comet passed close to the Earth on its 76-year orbit around the Sun. The scientific community was so interested in monitoring the periodic comet's activities, a global effort to study P/Halley around the clock was organized, known as the International Halley Watch. The International Halley Watch recognized that the ability to operate from multiple locations around the globe has a number of advantages:

• Observing conditions at any one site become less of a factor and less of an impediment to a successful observing experience.
• The ability to observe at different latitudes opens up much larger parts of the sky to the observer.
• The ability to observe from different longitudes makes night-time observations possible from classrooms during their school day
• Telescopes can be assigned based on observing requirements such as duration of observation, visibility of the target body, required angular resolution, type of observation (image, spectra, photometry).
• Coordinated observations between observatories can provide long baseline temporal coverage.

Access to Resources: A significant overhead is involved in the individual development of software, hardware and training programs. We propose to offer an economy of scale to the TIE affiliates. Through the formalism of a distributed data system, resources such as these will be developed once and used by all network members. The proposed system will provide a central data archive located at the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, making use of the NSSDC archive and distribution system, insuring the integrity and accessibility of TIE observations at minimum cost.

In addition to data, analysis tools, instructional materials and guidelines will be made available on line for use by all network members.

Common Look and Feel: A common user interface using Software Bisque's "The Sky" software is in use at every TIE observatory. This ensures that every observatory in the network will feel comfortable and familiar to the end user. Similarly, a single "home" TIE web site will be developed providing access to the resources of each TIE observatory. The home site will contain materials and information common to all TIE observatory programs, such as access to data and tools, teacher resources (e.g. professional development materials, lesson plans), student-centered materials (e.g. Student Ap. J, "Ask the Astronomer" link), applications for observing time and collaborative software for proposal review. Many of these resources already exist; we are proposing value-added services to increase the utility of existing programs through integration, coordination and where appropriate, archiving.

Diversity:

The Tennessee State University (TSU) has a strong track record of outreach with astronomy education to underrepresented minorities. The ongoing faculty/student research at TSU, recently proposed video streaming courses in astronomy, work with South Carolina State University (SCSU) in summer undergraduate research, and the ongoing relationship with New Mexico High School Supercomputing Challenge primarily serve underrepresented minorities. TSU has plans to continue to support and further develop these efforts. The primary target population of the online courses are those MU-SPIN schools where astronomy is not taught. These are not only underrepresented but currently have little access to space science opportunities. TSU is exporting workshop the Explorers of the Universe research techniques to middle and secondary schools as an attempt at long term development of students interested in the Science, Math , Engineering and Technology curricula in college. This proposal will leverage TSU's outreach activities and provide an engaging new activity to add to the astronomy syllabus.

Scope of Work

We propose four major tasks, described in detail in this section:

The concept of unifying the operations of several telescopes into one virtual observatory has at its crux a straightforward scheduling application. At the moment, the telescopes are scheduled by hand. Schools are asked to request a reservation up to four months in advance, providing several possible dates and times. While this method is sufficient for scheduling one telescope, a program coordinated among several telescopes is more complicated, and a scalable solution is required. Requests for observations will be received for various parts of the sky from various potential observers. The initial application will develop a scheduler prototype for three telescopes and will solve for the schedule that makes optimal use of the available resources (individual sites will be able to make themselves available or remove themselves according to their needs). The second phase of deployment will consider weather and technical status as attributes, in order to make real-time adjustments to the schedule when appropriate and necessary, adding a routing capability to the scheduler.

Co-I Smith (Tennessee State University) and colleagues operate a group of automated telescopes at Fairborn Observatory in Patagonia, Arizona. Dr. Smith's group developed the scheduling algorithms used by these telescopes. These instruments form the astrophysics centerpiece of the NASA University Research Center for Automated Space Science (CASS). Data from this facility have contributed to over 150 refereed publications in such journals as the Astrophysical Journal, Astronomical Journal, and Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The research reached a high point in November, 1999 when TSU observed the first direct detection of an extra solar planet in the HD209458 star system. This historical event was heralded around the world by the news media (CNN, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Science).

Dr. Smith's expertise is critical to the design of the Virtual TIE scheduler. At the present time, however, each TSU telescope is scheduled individually to support the research of the scientist making the particular study. Thus, we cannot simply adopt the TSU software whole-cloth. We plan to re-use components of the TSU system whenever possible.

In order to scale the system to many telescopes with many potential users, a more complex match-making algorithm will be required. The process of matching "buyers and sellers" is a common e-commerce application. Co-I Yesha brings extensive e-commerce experience to the team and will work with a graduate student at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Dr. Smith and the team of cooperating partner Dr. Keating (National University of Ireland, Maynooth) to develop the scheduling solution for Virtual TIE. Dr Keating’s team will assist in the porting of this scheduler to a web environment. This will include the proposal and testing of the scheduler user interface.

Dr. Keating’s team was recently responsible for producing a public information service (http://www.b4ucall.com) that allowed users in Ireland and Northern Ireland to calculate mobile telephone costs for calls including roaming and cross-border calls. The problem is a difficult one as it involves providing comparisons for highly-structured (and different) data models (operator tariffs) and data visualization suitable for public understanding. The site was well received in both jurisdictions, receiving National Newspaper and Radio coverage, and has recently attracted support and further funding opportunities from both government and corporate sources in Ireland. Dr. Keating’s team will bring many of the techniques used in the development of the site, and other projects, to the proposed research project. We note, however, as described in the "Partnerships" section, that Dr. Keating must apply for funding separately since his institution is outside the U.S.

As we further describe below in the "Partnerships" section, we plan to work in concert with Dr. Ian Gatley’s group from Rochester Institute of Technology. Dr. Gatley’s group is building a similar application to handle remotely controlled observations in Antarctica. While their application is somewhat different in that it involves one telescope, we intend to share ideas and lessons learned with Dr. Gatley’s team in order to strengthen both activities.

Task 2: Virtual TIE Library: Data, Resources, and Tools & Services

A. Active Data Archive

A driving motivation for this project is the need to archive the data obtained by the TIE affiliates and provide access to these data to the community at large. At the moment, no architecture is in place to preserve the data obtained from all TIE affiliates. Not every learner will be able to remotely operate a telescope to obtain their own data. Some will not have access to the operating software, some will get "weathered out," and some will simply not be in a class involved in TIE activities. No technical reason exists, however, to prevent any interested learner from accessing previously obtained data (and incorporating the data into a learning experience, see Tools and Resources below) via the Web.

We propose to develop an Active Data Archive for TIE affiliates as a component of the Virtual TIE Library. In keeping with our general "open systems" philosophy, this project strives to design the repository to maximize access and use by the community. We embrace technologies which promote interoperability, such as XML, and RDF.

The TIE archive will be built on open web standards, facilitating use by new schools and integration of new TIE affiliates, and providing interoperability with other astronomy information systems, such as the NSF-NASA proposed National Virtual Observatory. We briefly discuss the two most important of these standards, XML and RDF, below.

XML - Requirements.

XML (the eXtensible Markup Language) is a language for defining markup languages. It allows the definition of custom containers for information, and expression of these in a standard way. The purpose is to achieve machine readability of the information. The language is used as a data interchange format and as an enabler of information retrieval.

Application of XML to TIE: A user must specify several parameters to issue an observing request, e.g. coordinates, exposure time, dark frame corrected (yes or no), flat field corrected (yes or no), filter to be applied, etc. Once the image or spectrum is obtained, these parameters become part of the metadata attached to the archived image. This information can be found, for example, in the commonly used FITS [1] header in astronomy. The beauty of XML in this case is that the same tagging scheme can be used as both a standard way to express requests, and also as the metadata format. Of course, additional metadata tags must be defined. Some will indicate properties of the telescope and CCD used to produce the image (e.g. focal length, ADC resolution), and others will indicate properties of the exposure that cannot be specified a priori, e.g. saturation rate. Since the archive will also contain images and spectra that have been manipulated by the students, we will require tags that represent various processing techniques, e.g. unsharp masking, superimposition, etc. It will be critical to understand and work with the astronomy data community to ensure that our use of XML interoperates with FITS, since that community speaks with a unified voice when it comes to file formats.

XML – Related Work: An XML tagging scheme is specified in a Document Type Definition (DTD). DTDs have been defined which address many of the requirements just described. The Robotic Telescope Markup Language (RTML) [2] enables the description of a complete observation request, and is hardware and software independent. (That is, it can be used to send requests to any telescope, regardless of the software which directly controls the telescope. If the software does not happen to support RTML, it is a trivial matter to translate the XML into platform specific commands.) The Astronomy Markup Language (AML) [3] enables the markup of standard astronomical metadata, as well as tabular data. The Astronomical Instrument Markup Language (AIML) [4] is an extension of the more general Instrument Markup Language. It provides a means of describing instrument characteristics, control commands, data stream descriptions, communication mechanisms, and pipeline algorithm descriptions. We are familiar with these standards, and will draw heavily on their success. Since our requirements are not entirely met by existing markup languages we will likely have to innovate to achieve an optimal solution. It is likely that our innovations will be helpful to other similar efforts.

RDF

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) [5] is a W3C standard for metadata expression. It is also the backbone of the impending "semantic web" [6], and allows for the definition and use of shared vocabularies to make arbitrary assertions. We will use RDF to advertise services that will be provided by TIE affiliates. Examples of services include: rendering, modeling, data mining, etc. It will be important for TIE affiliates to conform to a common standard for describing and requesting services, and RDF, as the W3C standard, will enable TIE participants to utilize services provided by non-TIE participants. For example, a data center might provide photometry services to the community, and advertise, in RDF, the required input, and possible outputs. The Virtual TIE service discovery agent will make the outside data center’s services available to TIE users.

Mr. Joel Sachs is our information retrieval expert, and will design the middleware to ensure that the Virtual TIE Active Data Archive is part of the global virtual observatory. As with the development of the scheduler, we will work in concert with Dr. Gatley’s group at Rochester Institute of Technology to ensure that our active archive is interoperable with their efforts.

Data Storage for the Central Archive

To approximate the scale of the storage requirement, we assume the following:

• provide a large disk capacity, ideally in the terabyte range;
• offer a high level of reliability, achieved by using an additional disk for data redundancy with the requisite software to effectively utilize redundancy;
• make the data readily available to a wide variety of clients, by simultaneously supporting NFS-2 and NFS-3 servers to export data to Unix clients, support an SMB server to export data to Microsoft clients, and support an Appletalk server to export data to Macintosh clients;
• provide automated backup capability for all archived data using "Backup Express;"
• meet the goals above for a cost of approximately US$6000 per TB.

Sustainability

Our colleagues at the National Space Science Data Center at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center are accustomed to dealing with data storage of this scale (and much larger!), and have offered to be the long-term host for the Active Data Archive [see attached letter from Dr. Joseph King, Director NSSDC). More specifically, the proposed initial system would provide this level of through integration of the following major subsystems into the existing NSSDC system:

• Nine 80 GB IDE disk drives plus one spare (US$3000). These drives would be configured in a RAID-5 storage array with one redundant drive for a usable capacity of 640 GB per system.
• Eight channels of IDE controller capacity (US$1000). There are several products which could fulfill this requirement. Research into these products is currently in progress.
• Ingrate components with existing NSSDC on line archive and distribution system utilizing Oracle DBMS and DIONAS FMS software and existing automated DLT file backup system.

In addition to data, the Virtual TIE Library would include access to ancillary resources that either facilitate use of the data directly, or provide instructional materials that include use of the data. Many of these resources already exist (http://tie.jpl.nasa.gov), and it is expected that the TIE community will continue to add to this corpus. We propose to build an interface to facilitate search, retrieval, and use of these resources, and submission to the library. Examples of such resources are described below.

1. Professional development for teachers: some teachers may wish to be trained in the use of the software for controlling the telescope, and they may wish to see sample classroom activities. Many of these materials already exist and are currently in use to train teachers. Effort by the TIE program is also underway to obtain certification for college credit for many of these training activities, to satisfy the requirement for ongoing professional development that many school districts have.
2. User’s guide: The "The TIE User's Guide and Workbook for Scholastic Programs and Amateur Studies" [7] is currently available on the TIE website and would be included in the Resource section of the Virtual TIE Library.
3. Lesson plans: some teachers may wish to use lessons plans offered in the library, and other teachers may choose to share lessons that they have developed. Samples are currently available on the TIE web site, and we propose to include these and new submissions in the TIE Library by developing a metadata schema which guides the user toward appropriate material for their specific needs. We will provide a user-friendly upload mechanism for new materials.
4. Undergraduate distance learning [to be proposed under a separate program]: PI Hoban intends to propose to the Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement NSF program to develop a distance learning course in observational astronomy for undergraduates. This course would use the data and tools in the Virtual TIE Library. If developed, this course would be included in the library as a resource.

In addition to data and instructional materials, the Virtual TIE Library would provide a means to manipulate the data. This service would prove especially useful for the undergraduate distance astronomy course and for learners who are not directly affiliated with a classroom participating in TIE.

Dr. Keating (NUIM), proposing to EU, plans to use the data in TIE Library as a testbed for teaching Computer Science. As part of Dr. Keating’s effort, tools and services for processing images and spectra will be developed and added to the TIE Library for use by the community at large. One area of interest to his research team is the generation and application of algorithms for image analysis and processing. Keating believes that it is imperative that his students encounter real data in experiments and learn to extract information following the application of algorithms. At NUIM, students may take Computer Science as part of a Science Degree (rather than a pure Computer Science degree) and it is common that students take a double-honors degree in Computer Science and Experimental Physics, or Computer Science and Mathematical Physics so this project provides focus and commonality for such students and educators.

Keating proposes that his students will develop a suite of standard image processing tools that may be applied to any image in the TIE archive. These would include, for example, line detection, thresholding, false color application, object identification, Bayesian techniques, motion detection, image enhancement etc. These routines would be represented graphically using icons and may be cascaded when applied to an image. Students may use graphical icons to build up an analysis (visual programming environment) that may be applied to a single image, or a series of images – directly captured from the telescope or from the virtual telescopes. The software will be web-enabled, allowing students to have real-time processing of images. Image processing will be provided by a specialist system (high-performance computational hardware residing at NUIM), which obtains images from the TIE archive, performs analysis, then returns a result to the user. Optimising data transfer will be an important area of study (bits will be making a round-trip across the Atlantic Ocean in many cases). NUIM will also provide students with the opportunity to create their own code blocks, assign icons, and incorporate the new algorithms into the system. It is our vision that the astronomy students in America will indicate that they need to perform a certain type of manipulation to the data, and the computer science students in Ireland will develop a tool to perform the required function on a request basis – this would enhance collaboration among our teams and our students, with each specialist concentrating on her or his subject, but working towards a common goal. This preparation is invaluable to students who wish to become members of the scientific community (as well as the greater technical workforce). The ‘sense of context’ gained from this project may be unprecedented at this level (international and cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary).

D. Online Proposal Review

Currently, proposals to reserve telescope time are sent to the TIE office and are reviewed locally. With the growth of the TIE affiliate network to 20+ telescopes and the commensurate growth of potential observing proposals, replacing the current method with a scalable system is imperative. To facilitate review of proposals by distributed reviewers, we propose to install a collaborative environment for document review. Several COTS and shareware applications are available, and the team has reviewed and used several (e.g. Discus, Twiki, Postdoc). We will review possible candidates, and install and customize a suitable low- or no-cost solution.

In addition to the collaboration software, Co-I Smith's will lead our effort to develop a framework for proposal development based on the scientific literacy project Explorers of the Universe (http://explorers.tsuniv.edu) underway at TSU. The project employs concept maps and vee diagrams as a focus to assist the students in their study and has proven very effective. The students usually work in teams of from two to five and have produced impressive astronomy-related documents and presentations. The Explorers software is being used with several of the NASA and NSF projects at TSU.

E. Virtual TIE Student Ap J

In the spirit of providing an end-to-end environment for scientific inquiry, we propose to provide an online publication environment for students. Following observation, processing and analysis, students would be able to publish their results on line, and we would provide a mechanism for peer review. This activity would be included as a suggestion in lesson plans available in the Virtual TIE Library. The underlying technology for this service would likely be the same collaborative tool used for the online proposal review (see III. above). We will design the "submission of results" process to re-use of the framework from the proposal development, thus leveraging the TSU Explorers software again, but also providing reinforcement of the process of scientific inquiry to the students.

Schedule & Management Plan

The Virtual TIE development team is widely distributed. We will hold two face-to-face meetings with the entire team; one at the beginning of each year. Quarterly progress reports will be provided to the PI for each of the 4 tasks. Team members will meet with each other as required. A schedule is given below.

Year 1

Task 1: Scheduler [3 telescope-prototype]

Task 1: Scheduler [3 telescope-prototype]

Partnering Institutions (funding requested in this proposal)

University of Maryland Baltimore County

Goddard Earth Science and Technology (GEST) Center

PI Hoban is on the UMBC staff of the GEST Center, a cooperative agreement between University of Maryland Baltimore County and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Howard University is a GEST consortium member, and one of the newest TIE Affiliates is the Howard University Atmospheric Observatory. The GEST Center provides a collaboration mechanism for consortium members, as well as the support of Goddard itself (e.g. Hoban is located at Goddard). Dr. Hoban will be responsible for the overall management of the project. Hoban is trained as an observational astronomer (PhD, UMCP 1989), and has been working for the past 8 years in the field of science information systems. Hoban was PI on one of the earliest educational web applications (NASA IDEAS program, "Astronomy Online: Ask Dr. Sue," 1994), and co-investigator on a successful proposal to NASA’s Earth Science Information Partners program on a project to develop an Environmental Legal Information System (http://athena.csee.umbc.edu:9080/ELIS/). Hoban will supervise directly the activities of Farrell (UMBC; Information Technology Specialist, web development/collaborative environments) and Sachs (consultant, interoperability technologies).

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Co-I Yesha, Bell Atlantic Professor of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering at UMBC, has extensive experience in electronic commerce applications. Professor Yesha will supervise a graduate student from the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering for the development of the scheduler.

Tennessee State University

Professor Willard Smith is Professor of Computer Sconce and the PI of a proposal to develop on-line streaming video courses for Astronomy 1 and 2. He is also the PI of the NASA/TSU Network Resources Training Site project, now being completed, where the strategic effort was successful in the networking of the several HBCU institutions in Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama and the schools of Metropolitan/Davidson County Public Schools in Nashville. He has extensive experience in information systems design and development. Dr. Smith will provide insight for the development of the scheduler and the collaborative components, and coordinate development of "proposal development" and "submission of results" frameworks. Tennessee State University is classed as an Historically Black College/University.

Raytheon ITSS

Co-I L. Mayo will be responsible for coordinating efforts with the TIE Affiliates and for coordination of the integration of the Virtual TIE archive into the NSSDC. The testing and deployment of the proposed software products will be a challenging task: each TIE affiliate is an independent entity with unique policies, procedures and concerns. Mr. Mayo is the Deputy Project Manager for Raytheon at the NSSDC and has over 20 years experience managing space and Earth science data system development, testing, and integration projects for NASA and has been instrumental in bringing online the latest addition to the list of TIE Affiliates, the Howard University Atmospheric Observatory. Mr. Mayo is also an established and well respected player in the space science education outreach community. He plays a key role in the development of a number of prominent space science education outreach programs such as "Space Weather Center" and "MarsQuest" Museum Exhibits, and Telescopes In Education, and is a member of the NASA OSS Sun Earth Connection and Solar System Exploration Education Forums, the DC Space Grant Consortium, and is director of the Raytheon ITSS Education Public/Outreach program.

TIE Foundation and Affiliates

Mr. Gilbert A. Clark is Director of the Telescopes in Education Foundation, a non-profit organization that was spun off following the resounding success of the TIE project at JPL. Mr. Clark will actively participate in brokering relationships necessary to test and deploy the proposed software with TIE affiliates. His participation is crucial to ensure the confidence of the community he has built.

Collaborating Institutions (not funded through this proposal)

National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Dr Keating of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, is a colleague of PI Hoban. Keating and Hoban share a strong desire to improve science literacy among our students, and, as a result, Dr. Keating will apply for separate funding from the EU to participate in Virtual TIE. It is envisioned that NUI will provide hardware for image processing and analysis as well as the development testbed for tool development. We propose a summer student exchange to immerse the students in the project for the mutual benefit of the students and the project. NUIM is currently building a new facility for pre-university students to participate in University activities, particularly in the areas of science and music. In the science area, it proposes to concentrate on Astronomy and Computer Studies. The Virtual TIE project will provide these pre-university students with opportunities previously unavailable. Dr. Hoban’s proposed courses could be taken by students in Ireland and US students could take the Image Processing/Computer Science online courses. A letter of intent to participate from Dr. Keating is attached.

Little Thompson Observatory

Little Thompson Observatory is one of the TIE affiliates which has offered to participate in the Virtual TIE prototype. A letter of support from Mr. Tom Melsheimer, president of the Little Thompson Research Foundation which operates the Little Thompson Observatory, is attached.

Howard University Atmospheric Observatory

The Howard University Atmospheric Observatory (HUAO) is currently being outfitted for participation in the TIE project. Howard University is a GEST Center consortium member, which facilitates collaboration among its members. Howard University has offered to participate in the Virtual TIE prototype. A letter of support from Dr. Demetrius D. Venable, chair of the Physics Department which operates the HUAO, is attached. Howard University is classes as an Historically Black College/University.

Rochester Institute of Technology

Professor Ian Gatley, Director of the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, shares the basic philosophy of our team: that telescopes, instruments, data and processing software are components of an end-to-end system, the purpose of which is to provide an information product to advance scientific inquiry. Gatley has developed and demonstrated a number of such systems, including remote operation of the infrared camera Abu which is mounted on a telescope at the South Pole, and the "Data Cycle System" for NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. Both groups are addressing problems of a similar nature, ultimately working toward the vision of a (National/Global) Virtual Observatory. Our team and Professor Gatley share the view that our efforts will be mutually served by frequent and open communication and collaboration. In that spirit, we intend to plan a coordinated effort so that our systems are interoperable with each other and the community at large, and we will share lessons learned and intellectual capital where appropriate. A letter of support from Professor Gatley is attached.