Orderly Withdrawal: NSF Astronomy Senior Review is Out

I've just skimmed bits of it so far, and as such don't have an immediate reaction.

I've been cynically fearing the release of this, and have also been looking for somebody to blame and as such have been cynical of "giant astronomy" projects like LSST that looked like they could suck the life out of everything else in an attempt to survive themselves. But that was too cynical of me, and it's very clear in the SR that they have gotten the message loud and clear that the community values and depends on it's modest-sized telescopes. Of course, it's also clear that there's not the money to do what needs to be done. It's not obvious at all, however, exactly what will come out of the SR.

Here's one point about the history of astronomy (or, at least, optical/IR astronomy, which is my field and thus what I know) in the last 10 years : the single-most important development and leap in capability wasn't a new telescope or new telescope class at all. It was the development of the CCD (followed by a decade or so by development of NIR arrays.) The CCD quantum efficiency is much higher than photgraphic film, it allows for multi-object imaging at once whereas photometers don't, it's linear, it's immediately available for computer processing (and, yes, computers enabled CCDs). The biggest telescope US telescopes of the time -- the Palomar 5m, the Kitt Peak 4m -- had a huge effective increase in their aperture thanks to the CCD.

It was an instrumentation thing. A breakthrough. Without any new huge telescopes. And, as such, at relatively modest cost, and over time widely available directly to many in the community as every large, medium, and small telescope eventually had CCD-based instrumentation.

Will AO prove to make huge important contributions to science? Dunno, it's just now in the last year or two going into regular, routine usage at our national facilities, so it's too early to say.

Neglecting instrumentation is scary.

Now, yeah, I will say that having to have new and sexy instruments at all times on all facilities is not necessary. There are solid workhorse instruments that should be supported. Indeed, I'd say that the suite of instruments on Gemini is pretty damn good at this point. What I REALLY want to see is upgraded instruments for the 2-4m telescopes. We've got great wide-field imagers (things like MOSAIC). What we're lacking is decent IR spectrometers. I want to do something with 0.5-ish", 2000ish resolution infrared spectroscopy. The only game in town is the Gemini 8m. Yeah, the aperture helps... but if I were able, instead of applying for 1.5h of Gemini time (that keeps getting turned down), I'd apply for a night of 4m time. But no love, because there's no such instrument. If only WIYN had something like that....

By supporting the workhorse instruments and getting top-notch instruments for our 2-4m telescopes, we would get an effectively HUGE increase in scientific ability, with instruments larger in number and more widely available to all astronomers. It would be a much better cost/benefit ration than the uberprojects are. I'm not arguing against pushing the envelope... but I think we preemptively written of fan area where large gains could be made for a relatively modest investment.

-Rob

Mind some acronym unpacking for us poor theorists? I got some of those, but not all. If NOAO = National Oceanic and Atmospheric Observatory, does that mean no climate monitoring satellites?

Ooops.
Other NOAO - National Optical Astronomical Observatory - they run the national facility telescopes in Arizona and Chile and do a lot of instrumentation,

GMT is Giant Mirror Telescope 20-30 meter concept
GBT is Green Bank Telescope - large new steerable radio telescope
LSST is Large Synoptic Survey Telescope - new large telescope concept with very large field of view for all sky monitoring
VLBI is the Very Large Baseline Interferometer, radio telescope
SKA is Square Kilometer Array - concept for next generation large aperture radio telescope
MRF is Major Research Facilities - NSF funding line for building things that cost a lot of money over many years; basically they can start a new project if and when they finish construction of something already in the pipe.

Guess my extrapolation from NOAA didn't quite work out. This is all ground based stuff, then?

yup, NSF is ground based only and pretty much all of the ground based stuff except for the private observatories.
About 1000 full time astronomers and techs, and about 2000 university based PIs and CoIs.
Not as big as the NASA component in astronomy, but critical to the foundational structure of the field.

This is a back week to be in Tucson.

Not only does the document say, "kill future instruments to keep 2m telescopes running", it says, "fire all of NOAO's science staff to keep 2m telescopes running."

The neglect of 2-4m telescopes is not because of the LSST or the TMT. The neglect comes from Gemini. The most hopeful thing I saw in that document is that the SR explicitly recommends that NSF look very carefully at Gemini when the contract is up, because Gemini is very expensive. The cost for the US share of Gemini is about the operating budget for both Kecks, 1 8m = 2 10m telescopes. The US is not getting value for its money from Gemini. Canada and the UK feel the same way. I am not sure what the right solution is but it seems that effective one will be to kill off most of NOAO's scientific and instrumentation expertise.