The WIYN Consortium recently made major commitments toward realizing a new strategic plan for the WIYN Observatory. The Board held its semi-annual meeting on 19 September at Yale, following a WIYN instrumentation forum and a meeting of the WIYN Scientific Advisory Committee. All three meetings wrestled with the issue of the level of continuing investment required to keep a state-of-the-art facility at competitive performance level.
At the heart of the issue is the very lean operations model specified in the WIYN agreement. That model calls for 6.5 FTE (full-time equivalent) staff and a modest amount of non-payroll funding. Shortly after operational handover, the WIYN Site Manager David Sawyer led the consortium to realize that such a level of support was just adequate to maintain the facility at its current capability. No upgrades, improvements, or major repairs would be possible within that envelope. At that time, the Consortium agreed to a one-time increment of support for two years. The purpose was to bring the facility closer to its design performance goals, and to address a number of issues with potential impact on safety and reliability that had been identified.
The backdrop to September's decisions was that the two-year bulge in funding was about to expire. We recognized that once again we would not be able to support development of new capabilities like the WIYN tip/tilt module, address ongoing performance issues like telescope top-end stability, and still keep up with basic infrastructure needs like improvement of the mirror handling facilities. After extensive deliberations of both the SAC and the Board, the Board agreed on an initial plan that leads to a long-term commitment of increased technical support for WIYN. The plan calls for an additional FTE per year from the KPNO technical pool and an increase in non-payroll funding for purchased equipment and contracted labor. The new support represents almost a 25% increase over the previous operations base. Dave Sawyer and Tony Abraham, Kitt Peak's lead engineer, are currently defining the program of improvements to be carried out in the coming fiscal year, based on this new level of support.
At the same time, the scientific members of the WIYN Consortium made genuine progress toward defining a joint approach to instrumentation development. Taft Armandroff (NOAO), Eric Wilcots (Wisconsin), and Steve Zepf (Yale) organized a very effective instrumentation forum, to which participants brought their ideas for the next generation of WIYN instruments. Those present agreed that the concepts for exploiting the wide field and good image quality were scientifically exciting. The excitement from a management perspective was that the university partners and NOAO expressed a new sense of joint commitment, based on a process and a plan for going forward.
The strategic plan calls for exploiting the unique qualities and features of the WIYN Observatory as they apply to leading-edge astronomical research. These administrative and fiscal steps mark a critical step on the path to reaching that goal.
Richard Green