Recently I was driving around Boston (actually being driven around Boston -- as a non-resident, I would not think of actually driving in Boston), and I was impressed with the number of new companies, some I had heard of and many more I had not, with their logos proudly displayed on buildings of all shapes and sizes throughout the city. We live in a time of remarkable technological change. A generation or two from now, this period of time will probably be recognized as marking the same kind of historical change as is associated with the industrial revolution.
Not only can astronomy not escape this change, we must embrace it. We must deploy all of the new tools as quickly as possible to answer the fundamental questions at the frontiers of astrophysics -- how and when the universe became structured the way we see it today. We live in a time when advances in our understanding of astronomy allow us to ask -- and answer -- questions that we could not have contemplated a decade ago. NOAO's long range plan (http://www.noao.edu/dir/lrplan/) summarizes what we see as some of the key science questions and describes the new facilities and capabilities that we believe will be required to answer these questions.
In this environment, the community rightly expects NOAO to take on a new and different role. Europe is already moving boldly to take the first steps toward building a 100-m telescope. In the US, building such a facility is beyond the capability of any single institution. For the first time in groundbased optical/infrared astronomy, our ambitions transcend the financial and intellectual resources of even the richest institutions, public or private. The challenge for the US is to take advantage of the diversity of skills throughout the astronomical community and to coalesce our efforts to achieve goals, facilities, and science of scale that are beyond the reach of any one of us.
During the coming fiscal year, NOAO will take the first steps toward the goals outlined in our long range plan. Specifically, working closely with Gemini and the independent observatories, we have created a steering committee to lead the effort to define the scientific requirements and establish the technical feasibility of building the next generation large telescopes. We are also beginning an active program to support science of scale, most notably exploratory surveys of the sky to the deep limiting magnitudes that can be reached spectroscopically with the Gemini and other 6.5-m to 10-m telescopes. We will use new methods of scheduling some of the time on NOAO telescopes and develop tools for data pipelining, archiving, and sophisticated database querying. At the same time, this is the year that observing time will become available to the community on Gemini North, the MMT, and the HET. We will also exploit the wide fields-of-view of the existing 4-m class telescopes at NOAO to complement the narrow-field, high angular resolution of the Gemini telescopes. To do so, we will require wide-field IR imagers and high throughput spectrographs that cover several tens of arcminutes.
Moving in these new directions at a time when the budget appears unlikely to grow rapidly will require a change in emphasis within the existing program. We will be redirecting the effort of many of the scientific staff toward these new initiatives, and we will need to acquire technical expertise, particularly in data management and systems engineering, that is not now represented on the staff. If we combine the necessity of undertaking these new programs with the downsizing of the staff that occurred last February, then it becomes clear that we cannot maintain the existing program in its entirety. The impact on Kitt Peak is described elsewhere in this Newsletter. As an editorial comment, I would add that I believe these are the last cuts that are feasible at Kitt Peak for the next several years. The continued operation of the 4-m class telescopes and the deep infrared imaging capability that will be available at the 2.1-m are essential to the effective planning of observing programs at Gemini North.
Any organization -- indeed every household -- must balance current consumption against future investment. The federal government itself is wrestling with this issue, not with notable success. I hope we will do better, but as always I welcome your advice. The stakes are high, and our goal must be nothing less than continued leadership for the US community in astronomy.
Sidney C. Wolff