Notice: This is an archived and unmaintained page. For current information, please browse astrobiology.nasa.gov.

2004 Annual Science Report

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Reporting  |  JUL 2003 – JUN 2004

Observations of the Hot Molecular Core in the Young Stellar Object IRAS 16293-2422 Using the Very Large Array

4 Institutions
3 Teams
0 Publications
0 Field Sites
Field Sites

Project Progress

Jeff Pedelty and Lee Mundy were awarded time on the Very Large Array (VLA) to observe the hot molecular core in the young stellar object IRAS 16293-2422. Four telescope sessions have been scheduled in July, 2004, to observe ethyl cyanide, methyl formate, and formic acid with approximately 2" spatial resolution in order to provide additional constraints on the molecular abundances and rotational temperatures in this low mass star forming region. A VLA proposal for high resolution (A array), multi-frequency, and high sensitivity observations of the OMC1-S, Trapezium, and BN region is pending, but, if successful, would lead to observing time in late 2004. A poster entitled "Radio Interferometric Searches for the Amino Acid Glycine in High Mass Star Formation Regions" was presented at AbSciCon 2004; a poster entitled "NRAO VLA Searches for the Amino Acid Glycine in OMC-1 and SgrB2 (N-LMH) and Other Molecular Explorations" was presented at the ALMA Science Workshop in College Park, MD.


NIRSPEC observations of the proplyd Hubble Space Telescope (HST) 10 in Orion were processed. As part of this effort Dr. Pedelty ported the Spectrum Synthesis Program (SSP) from the Sun Solaris operating system to both Apple OS X and RedHat Linux. This enabled the comet group to move their processing environment to newer computing platforms (Rowan University to Linux platforms and Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to Apple G5s).