Leiden InterCat team successful with JWST proposals
The Leiden team consisting of Ewine van Dishoeck, Melissa McClure and Harold Linnartz have been very successful in securing more than 100 hours of observing time to observe ice and dust in star-forming clouds at the the James Webb Space Telescope.
On March 30, the results of the first General Observer call for the James Webb Space Telescope were announced. The successful programs were selected after a highly competitive process with an oversubscription factor of more than four. The Leiden team consisting of Ewine van Dishoeck, Melissa McClure and Harold Linnartz were very successful in securing more than 100 hours of observing time to observe ice and dust in star-forming clouds. Four proposals are led from Leiden and there is active Leiden involvement in at least three other proposals related to InterCat science. This extra observing time comes on top of the guaranteed observing time (PI van Dishoeck) and early release science program IceAge (PI McClure, co-PI Linnartz) led from Leiden. JWST is expected to be launched late 2021, with first scientific data delivered by late summer 2022.
The new programs will use both the MIRI and NIRSPEC instruments, which provide R~3000 integral field spectroscopy data over the 2-28 micron range at high spatial resolution. This is the regime where ices and dust have their main vibrational modes. By covering a wide wavelength range, identification of individual species can be secured through detection of multiple features. Both simple and complex molecules are covered in a few dozen sources at different evolutionary stages. The range of temperatures and UV exposure in the sources will allow investigations of variations in ice abundances with physical parameters.
Overall, InterCat students wil have plenty of JWST data to work with!
van Dishoeck: The JWST Protostellar Ice Legacy Survey 21.5 hr
McClure: Mapping inclined disk astrochemical signatures (MIDAS) 24.9 hr
McClure: It's COMplicated: Disentangling the formation pathways of complex organic molecules from molecular clouds to comets ID: 17.7 hr
Rocha: Ice chemical complexity toward the Ophiuchus molecular cloud
7.2 hr
Pontoppidan: A chemical census of volatile ices in protostellar envelopes 15.7 hr
Yang: Blazing the trail of COMs from ice to gas 24.6 hr
Zeegers: Illuminating the dust properties in the diffuse ISM with JWST
31.0 hr
The full list of JWST GO1 programs can be found at:
https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/approved-programs/cycle-1-go