Summer 2022 Proposal and Science Workshop

General Information

NICER is a non-imaging X-ray telescope mounted onboard the International Space Station. It is sensitive to X-ray photons in the energy range 0.2-12 keV and boasts the largest effective area of any instrument up to 5 keV, a factor 2 larger than XMM-Newton. It provides timing accuracy as well as CCD-level spectral resolution. NICER's narrow field of view of about 30 arcmin^2, large effective area, and low background results in a high dynamic range of sensitivity. NICER can detect a 10 microCrab X-ray source at the 5-sigma level in a 10 ks exposure. Taking advantage of its host spacecraft orbit and its own agility, NICER can observe any non-sun-constrained target multiple times a day. Thus, NICER is the most versatile soft X-ray instrument in operation today capable of providing spectro-temporal data for a wide range of scientific investigations.

We invite the full astrophysics community to a workshop highlighting the technical and scientific capabilities and strengths of the NICER mission. The workshop will be held virtually on August 31st and September 1st, 09:00-11:00 & 14:00-16:00 EDT.

The program will provide examples of how NICER can further the community's diverse scientific investigations. The NICER Cycle 5 proposal deadline is September 14, 2022.

Registration

Registration is open for everyone at the Registration Page. We will send information on how to connect to the workshop a few days before the start of the meeting to all registered participants. There is no fee to participate in the workshop. We plan to record all presentations for off-line viewing.

Please Note: The registration deadline is Tuesday, August 30th at 1 pm EDT.

Invited Speakers

Invited Speakers include:

Riccardo Arcodia (MPE)	Craig Markwardt (NASA/GSFC)
Zaven Arzoumanian (GSFC)	Ethan Partington (Wayne State)
Denis Bodewits (Auburn)	Dheeraj Pasham (MIT)
Peter Bult (NASA/GSFC)	Anna Payne (U. Hawaii at Manoa)
Teru Enoto (RIKEN)	Paul Ray (NRL)
David Espinoza (UNAH)	Claudio Ricci (U. Diego Portales)
Elizabeth Ferrara (NASA/GSFC & UMD)	Ron Remillard (MIT)
Keith Gendreau (NASA/GSFC)	Jingyi Wang (MIT)
Kenji Hamaguchi (NASA/GSFC & UMBC)	Thomas Wevers (ESO)
Renee Ludlam (Wayne State)	Yuhan Yao (CalTech)

The Program

All presentations were recorded by consent.

Date	Time	Presenter	Title
Wednesday August 31
Morning 9:00am - 11:00am EDT Chair: Elizabeth Ferrara
	9:00 - 9:20	Keith Gendreau Zaven Arzoumanian	The Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer Mission: Status Updates
	9:20 - 9:40	Craig Markwardt	NICER Analysis and Calibration Summary for Proposers
	9:40 - 10:00	Riccardo Arcodia	Quasi-Periodic Eruptions
	10:00 - 10:20	Thomas Wevers	A dynamic view of supermassive black hole accretion with tidal disruption events
	10:20 - 10:40	Dheeraj Pasham	What makes NICER uniquely suited to study supernova, high-redshift tidal disruption events and identify binary black hole candidates?
	10:40 - 11:00	Open discussion
Afternoon session 2:00 pm EDT - 4:00 pm EDT Chair: Dheeraj Pasham
	2:00 - 2:20	Paul Ray	Observing rotation-powered pulsars with NICER
	2:20 - 2:40	Renee Ludlam	Leveraging NICER to Understand Accretion in Neutron Star Low-mass X-ray Binaries
	2:40 - 3:00	David Espinoza	NICER Monitoring of Colliding Wind and Extended X-ray Emission from Eta Carinae
	3:00 - 3:20	Dennis Bodewits	Observing Comets with NICER
	3:20 - 3:40	Marina Orio	The white dwarfs in two recent recurrent novae, and the astonishing phenomena around them
	3:40 - 4:00	Open Discussion
Thursday 2022 September 1
Morning session 9:00 am EDT - 11:00 am EDT Chair: Craig Markwardt
	9:00 - 9:20	Elizabeth Ferrara	Proposing for NICER Observations
	9:20 - 9:40	Ron Remillard	Background Models and Filtering Results for Quality Control
	9:40 - 10:00	Teruaki Enoto	Power of agile and flexible observations of the large effective area NICER telescope
	10:00 - 10:20	Peter Bult	Monitoring Accreting Millisecond X-ray Pulsars with NICER
	10:20 - 10:40	Kenji Hamaguchi	NICER Observations of Low-mass Stellar Flares
	10:40 - 11:00	Open Discussion
Afternoon session 2:00 pm EDT - 4:00 pm EDT Chair: Ron Remillard
	2:00 - 2:20	Claudio Ricci	NICER monitoring of the changing-look AGN 1ES1927+654
	2:20 - 2:40	Ethan Partington	A NICER view of the variable X-ray obscurer in Mrk 817
	2:40 - 3:00	Jingyi Wang	The NICER "Reverberation Machine": a systematic study of time lags in black hole X-ray binaries
	3:00 - 3:20	Anna Payne	NICER reveals the X-ray properties of the periodic nuclear transient ASASSN-14ko
	3:20 - 3:40	Yuhan Yao	Characterizing the New Black Hole Candidate AT2019wey using NICER and Multi-wavelength Observations
	3:40 - 4:00	Open discussion

Scientific Organizing Committee

The Scientific Organizing Committee consists of:

George Younes, Keith Gendreau, Ron Remillard, Zaven Arzoumanian, Elizabeth Ferrara, Dheeraj (DJ) Pasham, Isiah Holt, Craig Markwardt, Michael Corcoran