Attending: Baldwin, Cecil (Chair & minutes), Diaz, Elston, Simkin. Dottori & McMahan were absent.
On 2/3 Pat Wallace & co (described as 3/4 of the Gemini TCS team) from the Rutherford Appleton Labs (UK) demonstrated the Gemini TCS on Cecil's display. The TCS has been delivered on-time and on-budget according to Pat. We encountered the 1st bug after about 5 minutes of operation. Oh well. They are now starting phase II of their Gemini contract, which will occupy them half-time for the next 2 yrs. So there is room for a SOAR contract. What I think they will be doing next is the instrument interface into the OCS. This means all the object-mark-go-there-point&click stuff as well as World Coordinates for the various instruments. His team are clearly professionals, not Oxford grad. students. What they have now is the pointing kernel with links to M2 & the mount. They get a guide signal externally. They have a nice ``sales-tool" which shows a simulated star-field, chopping, tip/tilt etc. All the algorithms are accurate down to 1 millarcsec. Everything is based on SLALIB and TPOINT, Wallace's standard libraries in use worldwide. Wallace's code is machine & OS independent. It forms modules within the centralized Gemini TCS. That TCS is based on EPICS, VxWorks, and VME crates. But you can get Wallace without all that baggage.
TCS issues will be discussed on 2/12 at a briefing on Gemini's TCS. There will be representatives from Gemini, CTIO, and KPNO as well as SOAR. German Schumacher is in Tucson from the CTIO controls group for 2.5 wks to discuss these issues. He & I will write a report after that meeting, outlining what SOAR will adopt from Gemini beyond its top-level Observatory Control System. It will likely be based on compactPCI PC hardware rather than VME.
A consortium formed by U. Hawaii is assembling to buy 2Kx2K HgCdTe chips, based on Rockwell's successful 1Kx1K chip. The buy-in is $100K with another payment of $150 when a science-grade chip is delivered ($0.25M each!) When Cecil & Sebring visited MSU in Jan., chair-person Brock expressed a sense of urgency in getting the SAC to support involvement by MSU in this effort. The SOAR Board is interested but would like the SAC to endorse this involvement. MSU is the obvious group to lead this because they have an ``in" in that one of their physics grads is in Rockwell management. Hence there is the possibility of helping MSU's fund-raising as well as getting chips that we will need. Rockwell's goal is to at least match the performance of the 1Kx1K chips over 4x the physical area, and there are goals to increase QE, reduce darks and readout noise.
Elston noted that the initial consortium is funded w/ $1M. It is an as-best-effort program where you might or might not get a good array for $0.25M. He asked what do you get for the $50K? Presumably Rockwell will sell these anyway, and they are the only suppliers. They will get money dumped on them by NGST, the proposals for which will go out at the end of Feb.
There was some discussion within the SAC about the desireability of giving up 2.5-5 microns in the IR imager. Cecil noted that yields from the ALADIN foundary run was low. It remains uncertain as to whether there will be a fully-functional science grade InSb chip for e.g. the GIRS clone.
Given these uncertainties in InSb, it was agreed that the SAC should get further details on the Rockwell buy in. Cecil will circulate language that the SAC can work from, to give the SOAR Board the scientific endorsement it feels it needs. Simkin will get from Loh & Kuhn at MSU the technical and programmatic details. [Cecil subsequently got a package from MSU that outlines the Rockwell proposal to UH. Unfortunately, this did not outline what would happen in the larger consortium, viz who gets what chip. Cecil then got a FAX from Ed Loh indicating that ``In the event that [Rockwell] cannot deliver 2K detectors, they have agreed to deliver 4 1K detectors at no additional cost as a fall-back position." The contract calls for delivery of science grade devices in 2 years. Cecil extracted the technical specs/goals & circulated them to the SAC for comment.] It seems that MSU will cover the bills for now. There will be more discussion at the next telecon.
Simkin reiterated the need for clear guidelines and science drivers so that everyone, including instrument builders who do not work in the night-time IR, understand our goals. Baldwin felt we should write down goals of what we want in our instruments, and then evaluate the proposals. He felt that we should look at the state-of-the-art in instruments and see what kind of science you can do. Simkin disagreed and felt that it was the simple things in instruments that trip you up. We need to specify these in detail because instruments turn out to be junk for trivial reasons. She felt that design reviews would not catch these sorts of things.
It was agreed that the partner science doc could be completed and endorsed by the end of Feb. The ``SOAR's niche" document draft will be ready for review by the end of next week. Cecil will hold off on the instrument document until he sees the Simkin/McMahan edit of the science proposals. Baldwin felt strongly that it was important not just to list the various projects, but also to develop their weighting and importance so that we see what we can do with our very limited instrumentation budget. It was realistic to expect that we could develop the instrument doc in March and review/approve it at the SAC meeting in South America. The other document in the works is an annotated review of the telescope specifications, outlining the rationale behind our choices. Cecil will work on a draft of that next.