Issue 3, November 2003

New books:

Dust in the Solar System and Other Planetary Systems

(COSPAR Colloquia Series)

Edited by: S. F. Green, I. Williams, T. McDonnell,. McBride (The Open University, Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute, Milton Keynes, UK)

http://www.elsevier.com/locate/isbn/0-08-044194-7

Prices: 0-08-044194-7 Hardbound EUR 200.00 Publication: November 2002

0-08-044194-7 Hardbound USD 200.00 Publication: November 2002

Contents: I. Meteors and meteoroid streams.

II. Observations of the zodiacal light.

III. Interplanetary dust.

IV. Dust in the outer solar systems and other planetary systems.

V. Cometary dust.

VI. Laboratory Studies.

VII. The near-Earth environment.

VIII. Evidence from meteorites.

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OPTICS OF COSMIC DUST

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Optics of Cosmic Dust,

Bratislava, Slovak Republic 16-19 November 2001

Edited by: Gorden Videen and Miroslav Kocifaj

Published by: Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2002 NATO Science Series (II. Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry -- Vol. 79) 320 pp.

Contributions presented in the book are divided into five parts: observational information, light scattering models, characterization methodologies, backscatter polarization, dynamics. The first part deals with laboratory measurements on cosmic dust analogues, the spectroscopic characterization of primitive material in meteorites, the current state of the components of dust modeling and the reliability of information obtained on the cosmic dust from transmitted, scattered and emitted radiation. Contributions of the second part concentrate on: numerically stable and accurate algorithms for computations of the internal and scattered fields and ill-posed inverse problems in optics, a database of optical properties of non-spherical particles, the process of aggregation to generate fractal aggregates. The following part of the book discusses solutions of the inverse problems and Monte Carlo modeling in application to cometary and Earth dust atmospheres. The largest part of the book concentrates on backscatter polarization. Photometric and polarimetric opposition phenomena exhibited by Solar System bodies and experimental modeling of opposition effect and negative polarization of regolith-like surfaces are followed by exact results of the vector theory of coherent backscattering from discrete random media and numerical techniques for backscattering by random media. The last part of the book deals with dynamics of dust particles under the action of electromagnetic radiation: review on the Poynting-Robertson effect in central gravitational field is presented and equation of motion for arbitrarily shaped dust particle is derived.

The additional information can be found on the official Kluwer WEB page.

Miroslav Kocifaj

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Announcements:

7th Conference on Electromagnetic and Light Scattering

by Nonspherical Particles: Theory, Measurements, and Applications

University of Bremen + Institut für Werkstofftechnik, Bremen, Germany

September 15 - 19, 2003

First announcement:

http://www.iwt-bremen.de/vt/laser/conference2003/conference2003-announce.htm

Time table

Deadline for submission of abstracts February 1, 2003

Notification of acceptance April 1, 2003

Deadline for submission of revised abstracts June 1, 2003

Final announcement and preliminary program August, 2003

Deadline for registration June 1, 2003

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Special issue of the Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer

devoted to the 6^th International Conference on Electromagnetic and Light Scattering by Non-Spherical Particles (Gainesivlle, March 2002)

The final list and abstracts of the papers

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