The following new projects, ranging from 3-cm to 8-m aperture, are currently underway at CTIO. (For some of the smaller projects I am assuming that current draft Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) do progress to fruition, as seems likely):
Gemini South - 8-m
SOAR - 4-m
2MASS South - 1.3-m
Yale/OSU/U.Lisbon/NOAO - 1-m `privatization' consortium
USNO southern astrometric survey - 20-cm
Swarthmore robotic southern Ha survey - 3-cm
Discussions are in progress on several other projects of various sizes, which we will report if they reach the point of an exchange of MOUs.
In the last NOAO Newsletter (October 1996) we announced that sources have now been identified for the US$42M estimated to be needed for the construction ($21M), commissioning ($1M), instrumentation ($6M), and operation ($14M) of the SOAR 4-m telescope. During the first half of this year we expect to conclude the project definition and scientific requirements phase, sign an interim agreement and hire a project manager to begin the SOAR project.
This will complete the preliminary phase of the current long-range plan at AURA to set up the larger-telescope end (Gemini South 8-m, SOAR 4-m and refurbished Blanco 4-m telescope) of a suite of general-user, southern-hemisphere, ground-based facilities for open competitive access to the general research community. The plan is fully consistent with the NAS decadal review for the 1990s and the report of the McCray panel on the future of NOAO.
Some of our planning energies can now be used to address the medium and small end of the aperture spectrum and provide a broader foundation for our pure research activities - to include all-sky surveys, along with educational and public outreach. Later in the year, under the auspices of a USGPO workshop and then a Gemini-sponsored international workshop, we will consider aperture requirements in the intermediate range of 2-m to 4-m. For example, even when the 2MASS near-IR survey is complete, we will still have a gap of at least 5 magnitudes between the faint limit of that survey at K (2µm band, in both Northern and Southern hemispheres) and the magnitude level at which we expect to be doing spectroscopy with the Gemini telescopes. This is a situation that we cannot allow to continue further into the future; nevertheless, until the Gemini workshop takes place, work on the middle part of our "aperture pyramid" will have to wait while we gather more information.
8-m Gemini South
4-m SOAR 4-m Blanco
The aperture pyramid, 1997-2002.
This article will be concerned with the bottom (foundation) end of the aperture pyramid, telescopes of aperture <2-m. In conjunction with the NOAO user community, the NOAO Public Information Office (PIO), and following conversations with Kathy Wood in the US Gemini Project Office, Susana Deustua of the LBL "Hands-on Universe" Project, Jose Maza of the Department of Astronomy in the University of Chile, and local officials in La Serena and Vicuña, we are considering how to address the application of small-aperture telescopes to research, teaching and outreach (to the public and to high-school and college classrooms). This activity will probably include members of the SOAR consortium as that project prepares to come on-line. We have been greatly encouraged by recent conversations with Saul Perlmutter and Aaron Canales, about the possibilities of providing increased communications bandwidth between the US and Cerro Tololo, at least prior to the arrival of the longer-term upgrades necessary for Gemini and SOAR operations here. More in the next Newsletter if these lead to positive results.
Our users have correctly reminded us that these small telescopes (diameter < 2-m) are the foundation of the whole research structure at NOAO. Here, for example, we have the best opportunities for direct day-to-day interaction with the teaching activities of AURA's member institutions - which, like the construction of large, state-of-the-art facilities, has much to do with securing a healthy future of our science and for our community, at a time when the impulse of funding into science and technology as a result of the Cold War is now over. Over the next 1-5 years the current 64Kbit/s bottleneck in international communications between US facilities in Chile and institutions at home in the US (and with our other international partners) will, one way or another, be removed. We are starting to prepare for the first time to play an active, on-line role in classroom and lecture-room activities in the US and in Chile. In conjunction with the newly-energized NOAO public information office (PIO) in Tucson, we are seeking to broaden our contacts with interested institutions in the US and Chile. More details will follow in a future Newsletter article - meanwhile, please contact me if you are interested in being able to help.
The results of the NOAO sponsored sessions on small telescopes at the Toronto AAS meeting are summarized in the Director's section of this Newsletter. What follows is an initial report on implementation of those recommendations in Chile:
A collection of some fairly recent papers on this topic appears in session 69 of the Tucson (185th) meeting of the AAS - e.g. look at: http://www.aas.org/meetings/aas185/abs/S6905.html, a paper by Pennypacker, Deustua, Perlmutter, Goldhaber and Arsem at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. describing the use of automated telescopes to search for supernovae and in support of LBL's "Hands-on Universe" high-school educational project: (http://hou.lbl.gov). This effort resulted in the acquisition of the earliest images of SN1994I by two students from Oil City High School, Pennsylvania.
The first robotic network station to be brought into operation at CTIO is in fact used to study the sun. This station - one of six operated by the Global Oscillations Network Group (GONG) - was set up and put into operation on CTIO during 1995. Progress reports and photographs can be found via: http://www.gong.noao.edu/sites.html.
The installation of this station allowed us to successfully re-open the first (Site CT-P-"A") of a series of telescope sites along the NNE precipice just below the summit of Cerro Tololo. A site map for GONG (and 2MASS) can be found at: http://pegasus.phast.umass.edu/2mass/site/ctio_site_map.jpg. GONG is at site "A," near the "T"-shaped end of the precipice access road (colored blue). We have begun conversations with a second solar oscillation network group - the TON, or Taiwan Oscillation Network - with a view to setting up one of their global network stations here. We have also begun informal conversations with people from two groups setting up global networks of small stellar robotic telescopes in the 0.5-1.0-m range. These non-profit groups are GNAT (see: http://www.darksky.org and Remote Telescopes Inc., headed by Wayne Rosing (rosing@trtci.com).
Swarthmore College has recently installed a 3-cm, all-sky, Ha robotic survey telescope on the former GONG site survey platform, on the Tololo summit. A separate article and pictures in the NOAO Highlights section provide further information on this newest addition to the telescope complement.
Moving up in aperture, the next survey telescope will, around May, be replacing the existing 16-inch Boller & Chivens telescope. The United States Naval Observatory (USNO) will begin a two-year campaign to secure astrometric CCD-based measurements and produce a high-density catalog of reference stars in the Southern Hemisphere between magnitudes 7 and 16 with accuracies of ~ 20 mas at epoch. This will be done using a specially developed, US$500,000, 8-inch, astrographic lens and a commercial, thermo-electrically cooled CCD camera. This equipment will be attached to a remotely-controlled modified Boller and Chivens mount originally used for a 24-inch telescope. Details of this project were presented by Steve Gauss et al. at the Toronto AAS meeting (conveniently next to a poster by one of my recent REU-program students). Further information can be found at: http://aries.usno.navy.mil/ad/ucac-s/.
This astrometric work will provide a dense set of positions ideally suited for initial calibration of our Hydra-CTIO multifiber spectrograph (currently under construction in our NOAO shops in Tucson) and to the near-simultaneous activity at our largest new all-sky survey telescope:
Installation of the building and dome for this telescope is nearing completion at site CT-P-B (Site "B"), i.e. just below the GONG site on Cerro Tololo. Installation and commissioning of the telescope will begin later this year. More information about the 2MASS project can be found via: http://pegasus.phast.umass.edu/.
Following announcements by Charles Bailyn and myself in previous NOAO Newsletters, the Yale 1m was closed at the end of January. The Yale 1m consortium (Yale, Ohio State, Lisbon, NOAO and perhaps the University of Chile) will carry out engineering work on the telescope during 1997, with a view to re-opening it for synoptic work early next year and operating it over a 3-4 year period. Ohio State, under the leadership of Darren DePoy, will be providing a two-channel IR/optical imager, ANDYCAM, for this telescope. The University of Lisbon will be providing the funds for bare-bones operation of the facility. Roughly 9% of the time is likely to be available for NOAO Users; further details will be provided in the next two Newsletters.
Malcolm Smith