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Minutes from the Astro 2020 Transients call on July 10

calling in: Dunc, Ryan Lynch, Paul Demorest, Kevin Stovall, James Okwe, Kevin Bandura, Nipuni Palliyaguru, Rich Bradley, Vishal Gajjar [anybody else I missed?]

* Timeline --- at the time of the meeting, this was not known, but the link above gives the window for pdf submissions as Jan 7-18 2019. Guidelines are pretty clear in the document and we are limited in each submission to 5 pages.

* Ryan points out that the whitepaper should be science driven. Ours should be based around what can be done with GBT and other GBO facilities (planned and existing) and leverage other facilities as needed.

* Existing GBO facilities:
 - LOFASM is in the 10-100 MHz band with 12x LWA antennas seeing the whole sky. Sites at Brownsville TX, CA, GBO and others planned? Teviot Creighton at UTRGV main contact along with Rick Jenet.
 - solar flare monitoring telescope --- was in operation? No longer in use?
   (Need to reach out to this community as part of this WP development)
   Somebody talk to Tim Bastian?
 - FLAG is a PAF on the GBT that has been developed by BYU/NRAO and WVU. It has been commisioned, though is not yet a user facility. Provides 1 deg^2 FoV for transients and pulsars with 7 beams in this field. Tsys~25 K.
BW~56 MHz. Particularly well suited for surveys of galaxy clusters for FRBs.
- GREENBURST - L-band all-the-time FRB detector now being commissioned
at GBT by WVU folks (DRL and students) has recently attained first light and 
looks very promising.

* Some ideas for GBO facilities:
   - 10 or more NgVLA dishes onsite for rapid follow-up of slow transients
   - LASA - L-band Array of Small arrays. A network of >30 1.8x1.8 m tiles which is a concept led by Steve Ellingson to form >16 beams on the sky that would be optimized to finding and localizing relatively bright FRBs and other short duration transient pulses. An MRI proposal has been submitted - pending a decision likely in August.
  - Wide Field Burst Telescope - Kevin B mentioned this as a promising idea for an array of horns on the ground which would be relatively cheap to asemble and operate in the 400-1200 MHz band, potentially going up to higher frequencies. Again, the idea here is to detect and localized bright FRBs.

* Science drivers discussed (incomplete list - need further discussion)
 - FRBs
 - Maser lines in C band with GBT
 - High-energy neutrinos (via lunar radio Cerenkov emission)
 - Flare stars
 - Slow transients (this was briefly discussed, it was not clear whether it falls under this group or not)

The meeting concluded with the general impression that further discussion is needed to synthesize these ideas and add other things not brought up. Role of leveraging Arecibo was also briefly mentioned. Unclear how to factor this in.
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