NOAO's responsibility is to provide leadership for new directions in national optical/IR ground-based astronomy. We have a community with talent, resources, and facilities distributed over a wide range of institutions. To enhance the scientific strength in that diversity, NOAO must emphasize its changing role and broadened mission.
Two key aspects of the evolution are:
• Operating existing nighttime facilities in a way that maximizes scientific output not only of NOAO, but from the perspective of the suite of telescopes nationwide.
• Maintaining an adequate level of investment in new developments to provide cutting edge instrumentation for NOAO telescopes on a competitive timescale and to support new strategic initiatives such as large telescopes and nationally accessible survey databases.
The expectation of an expanded mission does not come with an enhanced budget. Much of the initial investment in new initiatives must come from the reprogramming of existing resources, in this case, away from KPNO. The internal allocation to KPNO is now $3.8 M/yr of direct costs, exclusive of scientific staff and new instrument development. This low level of support now falls within the range from which the McCray Committee Report defined the necessity and the order of closing existing facilities. We must now follow their mandate. The outcome is a short-term reduction in scientific productivity and community access. The gain is anticipated to be in the long-term development of NOAO instrumentation and national telescope and data initiatives to keep US astronomy competitive.
The transfer of scientific and technical resources from support of KPNO (in the context of a decreasing budget envelope) leads to the following operational changes:
• At the budget level currently allocated to KPNO, it is impossible to maintain the full suite of capabilities currently offered. Accordingly, we plan to phase out the operation of the 0.9-m and the Coudé Feed telescopes on a one-year timescale.
• Semester 2000A will be the last opportunity for new proposals for the spring sky. Some weight will be given to completing projects already started. A limited amount of time will be offered in Semester 2000B for completion of projects (since users were not notified prior to 1999B).
• Solicitations for operation of the two telescopes by other groups will be prepared and decided promptly enough that little gap in science operations ensues.
NOAO has always received guidance and pressure from the community at large that reflects the diversity of opinion on the priorities of our program. Many of these pressures do not arise from consideration of the current scientific productivity of our facilities. After debating the following arguments, the scientific staff was reluctant at best to support the closures, particularly of the 0.9-m.
• NOAO's highest priorities should be community leadership for new large telescope projects and support of US science from Gemini and other 6-10 meter facilities. Resources supporting access to existing facilities should be minimized to create support for new initiatives. Observations with 1-m class telescopes are not generally adequate to support limiting investigations with 8-m class telescopes.
• NOAO should not allocate resources to facilities that could, in principle, be supported at the university observatory level. Implied prioritization by national committees and AURA has emphasized NOAO's support of leading edge research over educational activities. Within a year, several observatories will have CCD Mosaic imagers -- —as long as the science can be done somewhere, the capability need not be available on a competitive basis to everyone.
• In times of tightly constrained resources, NOAO can justify supporting only those facilities with competition factors comparable to those of the NSF research grants program, which now is able to fund only about 20% of the proposals received. A casualty of reduced budgets is the support of unique, but lower demand science, such as high dispersion stellar spectroscopy at the Coudé-Feed.
• The beginning of Gemini operations marks the change where NOAO's largest aperture is 8-m, and we should ratchet up the rest of the support structure by a factor of 2 in telescope size (we don't now operate 0.4-m telescopes on Kitt Peak).
• The (admittedly small) amounts of money spent on operating 1-m telescopes would produce more exciting science if spent on larger apertures.
• Operating 1-m telescopes is equivalent to the night lunch cook -- it makes the wrong impression, even though it is a capability offered at very low marginal cost for great return. In this case, the apperance is that NOAO still has a budget sufficient for NSF Astronomy to redirect funds to other Division priorities outside NOAO without major impact.
• Given that we are operating KPNO, the 1-m telescopes are highly cost effective, producing excellent science at extremely low marginal cost.
• Both 1-m telescopes provide unique capabilities.
• The 0.9-m provides a vehicle for science with the CCD Mosaic imager rather than having it sit idle when the 4-m is scheduled for other instruments.
• Programs carried out on the 1-m telescopes represent 30% of the total programs undertaken at KPNO. This lost science represents a substantial fraction of our user base, which would potentially make KPNO seem less essential to an increased fraction of the community.
• The 0.9-m is the most effective way to support the use of Hydra on WIYN because of the uniform astrometry it produces.
• The 0.9-m is a good match to supporting spectroscopy with 4-m telescopes, in general, and wide-field surveying is essential to survey for potential objects to carry out a scientific program without a known object list.
• The 0.9-m can provide calibration for non-photometric data for KPNO and Gemini North.
• KPNO still has an obligation to support graduate training and other educational programs, for which the 1-m telescopes play a key role as many of today's young and mid-career astronomers would attest.
• Some members of the scientific staff strongly support operation of the 0.9-m as reflective of our historical mission to provide excellent capabilities on the basis of scientific merit alone.
• At the current budget level, KPNO does not have enough support personnel to operate five telescopes effectively, and we should not sacrifice the reliability and productivity of our major facilities by trying to do too much.
• The demand on time at the margin impacts nearly all our main skills -- OA's, mountain programming, electronic maintenance, detector and instrument support, scientific staff. Satisfaction with a job of a manageable scale is a major component in retention of key people.
• Transferring the Mosaic between the 4-m and the 0.9-m entails risk and is a significant support burden.
• The telescopes would still be used productively, although differently, if they were run by a group or consortium instead of KPNO.
These arguments demonstrate convincingly that the choice for change is extraordinarily difficult. In the end, I felt compelled to call for the phased closure of the two telescopes. This action responds to political realities, reshapes the suite of capabilities to one that we can support adequately and safely, and accelerates the pace of changing our mission. The intent of the revised investment strategy is to provide excellent instruments and operations of the largest KPNO telescopes for mid-decade while supporting NOAO's strategic initiatives for national programs.
As always, I value your opinion and reaction.
Richard Green