Campuses:
Attendance: Shaul, Amy, Al, Bill, Julian, Raphael, Clem, Jeff
Notes by: Shaul
Recap from a week or two ago - what has been discussed and what are the final decisions? Overall sentiment is for two workshops. An earlier one, revolving around Foregrounds and perhaps systematics, and a later one focusing on science and the complementarity between space and ground.
Raphael volunteers to organize the Foreground workshop at UCSD, perhaps around October.
Shaul says there is urgency to announce, as the dates are very close
Al reviews features and characteristics of Pixie. Superpixie, a Probe scale spectrometer, would improve upon Pixie by approximately a factor of 10. Considering predictions about known physics, the improvement is primarily on mu-distortions.
In the three way path - a probe spectrometer, combined mission, and imager alone - the improvement of a spectrometer alone upon Pixie does not appear compelling, leaving two options for the Probe: the combined mission and the imager alone.
Al sees benefits in foreground characterization for a combined mission. Clem says that most of the dust uncertainties are on small scale and the spectrometer will have coarse resolution. There is a agreement that if we are to proceed along this path, the case needs to be clarified and strengthened.
Shaul and Amy point out that the October decision between a combined mission and imager alone should be made after we have concrete notion of how a combined mission looks like. They encourage Al to have his group solidify the science case for the combined mission so that technical progress can be made. Al is worried about the available time to do this work given the other commitments people have. Shaul suggest that Al consults with his group and report back.
Shaul reports on recruiting Nick Battaglia to head the 'extragalactic WG' and on plans to recruit David Chuss and Laura Fissel to provide the communications with the galactic polarization community. Shaul will be talking to Fissel tomorrow. Julian mentions that Brandon Hensley, Bruce Draine, and Alex Lazarian are already helping S4 with foreground models and they should also be contacted to help with connections to galactic science.