Efroimsky and Murison submitted a proposal to NASA to study the long-term orbital evolution of the Martian satellites and its effects on the time variability of the Martian obliquity.
Murison completed the section of his adaptive optics (AO) program that controls the motion of the FTS adaptive optics mirror. He is now working on the star image centroiding section. When this is complete the FTS AO should be ready to move from the test bench at USNO to the FTS I at the Clay Telescope.
Murison put together a plan for recording high-resolution white-light images of the upcoming Venus transit. A telescope will be set up on the parapet outside the 12-inch dome on top of Building 1. A video camera feed will be streamed over a wireless connection to the USNO intranet, allowing viewing of the video stream from one or more computers (e.g. in the Library). The equipment configuration (video camera, optics, computer connections) and control software has been tested and demonstrated to work. Unfortunately, the weather control program seems to have problems and may be an issue.
