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NOAO 2000 - Planning for the Future...(1Mar94)
A Progress Report from KPNO
(from NOAO HIGHLIGHTS!, NOAO Newsletter No. 37, 1 March 1994)

The decade of the 1990's is one of profound change for astronomy,
offering both challenges and opportunities to NOAO.  While the funding
climate for the nation as a whole, and for NSF and NASA in particular,
appears less than optimistic, this decade will also see the
construction of staggering new astronomical facilities,
instrumentation, and detectors and breathtaking gains in scientific
capability through adaptive optics, interferometry, and other new
techniques.  What is clear is that NOAO must change too, to meet the
challenges of the Gemini era and to provide for the best use of limited
national resources to meet the needs of the astronomical community in
the 21st century.

The scientific staff of NOAO have initiated in each division (CTIO,
KPNO, NSO, and the US Gemini Project Office) thoughtful discussions of
the future needs of the community and the role that NOAO should play to
meet those needs.  The effort by the KPNO staff began with a detailed
examination of the programs within NOAO (telescopes, optical and IR
instrumentation, operations, software, etc.) and of where those
programs should lead in the year 2000.  Small groups met in each area
to formulate recommendations for broader discussion by the whole
staff.  Bringing these recommendations together and prioritizing them
into an overall program required developing a consensus among the staff
as to the most important issues.  Using this consensus as a guide, we
are again tackling the details, focusing on the capabilities that NOAO
should be providing to the community at the start of the next century.

What emerged from these discussions was an overriding consensus of the
unique role of NOAO in the astronomical community.  The National
Observatories have responsibilities in leadership, service, and support
of scientific research that are intrinsically different from those of
universities.  The strength of our program, and of our community, lies
in our diversity and in our ability to support the wide spectrum of
American astronomy.  NOAO must aggressively maintain the richness of
our full program, and must not emphasize one aspect of our program at
the expense of others - to succeed, the NOAO program must include
telescopes that perform to the highest standards of image quality and
throughput, an outstanding instrumentation program building instruments
widely recognized as the best, and a strong scientific and technical
staff leading forefront research and development programs.  This broad
program, encompassing the Gemini 8-m telescopes at its heart, offers
the best path to the future.  If "uniqueness" was the astronomical
buzzword of the 1980's, "diversity" may be the key to the 1990's.

The success of NOAO is often judged on how far and how quickly we push
back the frontiers of astronomical knowledge.  This focus on excellence
in research is clearly important, but our mission is broader than
simply to enable the few to do the best research.  Our mission must
also recognize our role as scientists to serve national needs, and to
encourage the long term health of our discipline.  By enabling
diversity in astronomy we allow for new and different perspectives, so
that any field is not dominated so strongly by the scientific judgement
of the few with access to private facilities.  By providing access to
competitive telescopes and instrumentation based on scientific merit,
NOAO contributes to innovation and integrity in astronomy.  The
National Observatories also contribute to the intellectual health of
the nation by involving the broadest possible community in forefront
scientific research.  Our users include scientists from all types of
institutions - from small private colleges to big state universities to
the most prestigious universities with their own facilities.  Access to
NOAO permits faculty members to remain scientifically and
intellectually active, and to be better teachers, citizens, and role
models for the wider community.  As well as by providing access to
facilities for graduate student research, NOAO contributes to the
broadest education goals in the US through the opportunities we can
provide for research experience in astronomy at the undergraduate level
and through the excitement about science that educators who are active
in research can bring to the classroom.

These additional goals are not met by emphasizing only the largest
telescopes, or only the most forefront scientific programs, but rather
by providing access to a range of facilities and capabilities.  NOAO
should provide not only the largest telescopes, but also enough
telescope time to serve the broader needs of the community.  Our large
telescopes should be competitive with the largest in the world, and
offer a range of capabilities.  Our small telescopes should be
specialized to keep the operations costs down, but well instrumented
and of sufficient number to provide access to a significant fraction of
the US astronomical community.  Only in this way can we truly fulfill
the mission of NOAO.

Representatives of the four scientific divisions of NOAO will meet
together in late March to share our visions and to forge a joint
consensus of where NOAO should be in the year 2000, and how we should
get there.  Following this NOAO-wide workshop, we will then invite
community input and discussion of the draft NOAO plan.

Caty Pilachowski

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