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Achievements and Prospects (1Dec94)
(from Director's Office, NOAO Newsletter No. 40, 1 December 1994)

A number of very significant milestones have been achieved since the last
newsletter. The Gemini project officially initiated construction in October at
both Mauna Kea and Cerro Pachon. Corning successfully completed the
fusing of the first 8-m blank for Gemini. During the next year this blank
will be slumped and generated before it is shipped to REOSC for polishing.
The WIYN telescope on Kitt Peak was dedicated in October; the imaging
performance achieved to date is remarkable. Site preparation has begun at
the GONG sites in Learmonth, Australia, Tenerife, Spain, and Mauna Loa,
Hawaii. Well-calibrated imaged data obtained simultaneously in November
with the GONG equipment destined for Tenerife and Big Bear agree at a
level that exceeds specifications. Ground was broken for a new visitor center
at Sacramento Peak in September, and re-modeling of the visitor center at
Kitt Peak was completed in November. Both of the visitor center projects
were financed with non-NSF funds.

This is a remarkable set of achievements, and it is a tribute to the staff of
NOAO and of the Gemini project that all of these projects are moving
forward as close to schedule and budget as funding allocations have
permitted. The staff have demonstrated their capability to carry out highly
complex projects successfully; observing evaluation reports indicate that we
have maintained a high level of service for the user community.

Nevertheless, NOAO is facing some very difficult times. The changed
priorities in Washington, the emphasis within the NSF on research that
directly supports these changed priorities, and the constraints on growth in
the federal budget all will impact the support for astronomy research in this
country and at NOAO. We do not yet know our budget for the fiscal year
that began on 1 October, but it is unlikely that we will see any growth in
that budget either this year or in the next several years. If there is no
growth, then the addition of major new programs such as WIYN, support for
US involvement with Gemini, the development of a new generation of
infrared array detectors, the deployment and operation of GONG, combined
with the increasing complexity of the new instruments that are being
commissioned at the telescopes, will force reductions in the support of
existing facilities and instruments.

NOAO is not the only organization facing hard choices. NASA, too, is re-
examining the balance between new missions and operations of still
productive older missions. Both of our northern hemisphere Gemini partners
are reassessing their priorities in astronomy. Several independent
observatories in the US will place large new telescopes into service in this
decade--the twin Kecks, Magellan and its probable twin, the MMT upgrade--
all of which will need both instrumentation and operating funds. The
national radio observatories operated by the NSF are experiencing budgetary
stress. It seems unlikely that belt-tightening alone will be sufficient over the
next ten years. It certainly will not be enough for NOAO, which has already
been forced to accommodate to about a 30 percent cut in inflation-corrected
dollars for operations. We will instead have to look at archiving, new
scheduling algorithms, and other changes in the way we obtain and
distribute data in order to maintain community access at lower cost.

A relatively modest increment in the support of groundbased astronomy--
about 10 percent in the astronomy budget at NSF--would be sufficient to
allow us all to reap the benefits of the magnificent new facilities that will
come on line over the next ten years. Qualitative changes in the types of
facilities available in the community--nearly half a billion dollars has been,
or will be, invested in new optical telescopes that will become accessible to
US astronomers in the next ten years--would in more normal times surely
have led to an increased budget. Even in these changed times, we should
work as a united community to make the case for enhanced investment.

We must also, as a community, deal realistically with priorities should that
enhancement not be achieved. NOAO expects to work closely with the user
community as we formulate our own program. That program will have to
include support for such major initiatives as Gemini and GONG, open
access for a significant portion of the astronomical community, and a
technical program that is capable of providing state of the art
instrumentation in selected areas. The difficult issue is to achieve the
optimum balance among these three types of activities. We have no desire to
cut back on any of the existing programs--after all, if we and the user
community judged any of what we do now to be not worth doing, we would
have already canceled it. Unfortunately, decisions that neither the users nor
NOAO can justify in scientific terms are likely to be forced upon us by
external circumstances.

We need your advice, and we also need your support. It is as difficult and
painful for NOAO staff to downsize or eliminate programs and facilities that
we believe in as it is for the users to modify their research programs to
accommodate to those changes. We will work closely with the user
community to define the best program possible within the resources
provided to us. Fortunately, whatever happens, we can all look forward to
making qualitatively new types of observations with Gemini, GONG, and
WIYN. Even with constrained resources, we can be justified in thinking that
the pace of discovery in astronomy will be unabated during the next decade.

Sidney C. Wolff

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