Dr. Roe is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the California Institute of Technology. The discovery of methane convective clouds at Titan's south pole has shattered the conventional view of Titan's atmosphere as quiescent and cloudless without significant weather except on seasonal time scales. Yet, a new understanding of Titan's weather and methane meteorological cycle is only just starting to develop and will require a variety of new observing techniques and strategies. High resolution adaptive optics images with large telescopes (Keck, Gemini, Palomar) show the locations, sizes, and morphologies of the clouds. Observing Titan's clouds with a variety of strategies on these telescopes will answer the many questions concerning spatial, lifetime, and size distributions of the clouds. Dr. Roe will employ a robotic 24" telescope equipped with CCD and custom filters to monitor total cloud coverage and to place the high resolution data in context as well as to trigger target-of-opportunity observations of extreme events. Dr. Roe will also map methane humidity using a new high spatial/spectral resolution technique that will reveal the global circulation pattern as well as show local features such as weather fronts. Finally, Dr. Roe will create a new inventory of photochemical products of methane, which will elucidate details of the methane cycle.
In addition, Dr. Roe will lead a group of first-year undergraduates in an annual 5-week collaborative research project and supervise 1-2 undergraduate student researchers each summer. Summer research students will be funded by Minority Undergraduate Research Fellowships (MURF) program, which is designed to increase the numbers of underrepresented students in science and engineering by providing support for talented undergraduates to participate in mentored summer research experiences at Caltech.
