US-Japan Long Duration Balloon Workshop

Proposal Summary

Support: Pending

Source: NSF

Award Period: 4/1/97-3/31/98

Abstract

This proposal requests support for a US-Japanese workshop meeting of the Polar Patrol Balloon (PPB) Working Group. The list of particpants will also include representatives from the Extended Life Balloon-Borne Observatory (ELBBO) Working Group and the Space Physics community. The general topic of this meeting will be to identify the current major scientific questions in the areas of ionospheric and magnetospheric physics that can best be addressed using stratospheric balloon flights of several weeks duration. The PPB program is a program of long duration balloons flights that the National Institute of Polar Research of Japan has conducted for nearly a decade. Three of these flights have carried an experiment supplied by the P.I., a U.S. investigator. One major agenda item of the proposed workshop will be consideration of the outstanding scientific questions that can and should be investigated by a continuation of the program and the collaboration. A detailed review of possible scientific objectives, instrumentation options and launch sites will be presented and discussed. Coordinated proposals to our respective funding agencies is a planned outcome of these discussions. These balloon flight proposals will be coordinated with proposals and plans arising from the efforts that the investigators will shortly propose to NASA in response to the New Mission Concepts NRA.

The agenda for this workshop will also include the analysis and interpretationof the data from the joint experiments on Polar Patrol Balloons 2, 4 and 5. There are at least three studies that are approaching completion and publication. Detailed, nearly final drafts of papers will be ready for review at this workshop. These papers are all at the stage where the quality of the outcome will be significantly improved by the kind of face-to-face discussions and active joint analysis that can only be accomplished in person. The topics of these papers include the events of December 28, 1992, global ionospheric convection and vertical field studies during the joint PPB-ELBBO interval in 1992-1993, and campaign duration averages of the convection electric field sorted as functions of IMF and Kp. Completion of these papers would be a top priority objective for this workshop. We plan to submit these papers either to the Journal of Geophysical Research or to the Journal of Geomagnetism and Geoeletricity.

There are a number of other studies of these data which may be fruitful, but which need to be initiated and developed. One particular topic that willbe addressed to prepare and review a list of intervals of interesting ULF wave activity observed during these flights that need to be studied in more detail. A site visit to Tokai University is planned to conduct these discussions.

We will try to schedule this workshop in conjunction with the Twenty-first Symposium on Coordinated Observations of the Ionosphere and the Magnetosphere in the Polar Regions, which will be held at NIPR in the Fall of 1997. Plans for this symposium are extremely preliminary at this time. Tentitavely, the agenda will include sessions on our joint experiments on the Polar Patrol Balloon Project, on Long Duration Ballooning results in polar regions, on coordinated US-Syowa observations and on future plans. Proceedings of this symposium will be published by NIPR as part of the Proceedings of the NIPR Symposium on Upper Atmospheric Physics.