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Notes from the US Project Office (1Mar93) (from the Director's Office, NOAO Newsletter No. 33, 1 March 1993) On 1 February Fred Gillett of NOAO became the Acting US Gemini Project Scientist. Gillett chaired the Infrared Panel of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey (Bahcall) Committee, leads the IR Subcommittee of the US Gemini Science Advisory Committee, and serves on the international Gemini Science Committee. Gillett and his subcommittee produced the performance requirements document that serves as the basis for the imaging specification of the telescopes, as well as defining the thermal emissivity goals. Gillett interacts with the Project on an almost daily basis, working with the various group engineers and Matt Mountain to assure that the design will meet the stringent performance standards. Richard Green has relinquished the primary national project scientist duties on an interim basis to concentrate on NOAO responsibilities while Sidney Wolff serves as Acting Gemini Director. With the advice of the national project offices, the Gemini Project has established a set of Instrument Working Groups that are now in the process of defining performance requirements and identifying potential participants in the process of designing and building the first-light instrument complement. In order to function efficiently, the working groups were purposely chosen to be small, but the US participants take seriously their roles of representing the larger US community. Their goal is to refine the instrument performance requirements sketched out in the Gemini Science Requirements Document for presentation at the next meeting of the Gemini Science Committee on 25-26 March at the DAO. Over the following few months, the working groups will be identifying the ways for the Project to get the instruments designed and built. Now is the time! If you want to be part of the process of defining the performance of a particular instrument, or wish you and your group to be considered as suppliers of an instrument or partners in a joint development program, please contact the appropriate US working group member. They intend to develop an e-mail network of interested participants, and will consider your input carefully in their deliberations. List of US Instrument Working Group members: Adaptive Optics: Don McCarthy dmccarthy@as.arizona.edu Steve Ridgway sridgway@noao.edu Francois Roddier roddier@uhifa.ifa.hawaii.edu Guiding and Active Wavefront Sensing: James Beletic beletic@gtri.gatech.edu Bruce Woodgate woodgate@champ.span.nasa.gov OUV Multi-Object Spectroscopy: Pat Osmer (chair) posmer@noao.edu John Huchra huchra@cfa.harvard.edu Bob Schommer rschommer@ctio.noao.edu Visible Imaging, CCDs: Gerry Luppino (chair) ger@uhifa.ifa.hawaii.edu James Beletic beletic@gtri.gatech.edu Todd Boroson tboroson@noao.edu John Geary geary@cfa.harvard.edu High Resolution Optical Spectroscopy: Caty Pilachowski (chair) cpilachowski@noao.edu Don York don@oddjob.uchicago.edu IR Imaging and Arrays: Jay Frogel (chair) frogel@payne.mps.ohio-state.edu James Graham jrg@ucbast.berkeley.edu Klaus Hodapp hodapp@uhifa.ifa.hawaii.edu Tom Soifer bts@tacos.caltech.edu IR Spectroscopy: Jay Elias jelias@ctio.noao.edu Paul Harvey pmh@astro.as.utexas.edu Fred Gillett and I are also happy to talk with you any time about the Gemini instrumentation program. There is now a copy of the most recent Gemini Science Requirements document available via ftp. To access this document, ftp to gemini.tuc.noao.edu, login as "anonymous" (using your name as the password), and change directories to pub/gemini. There are two versions of the file, compressed and not compressed. Use the command "get" to obtain the file, and exit with "quit". The uncompressed file is called science_reqs.ps and is ~250 Kbytes long. This can be printed directly on any PostScript printer. The compressed version is called science_reqs.ps.Z and is ~87 Kbytes long. Use unix uncompress to turn it into a PostScript file and print as above. Please contact Bill Weller if you encounter any difficulties. Richard F. Green
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