Participants: Baldwin, Cecil, Dottori, McMahan, Simkin. Absent: Diaz (dropped after a bad connection), Elston. The telecon lasted 1 hr.
 

Ground-breaking

Baldwin offered, and all accepted gratefully, for CTIO to make La Serena hotel arrangements for SAC members. Contact Jack directly if you need to arrange for plane tickets to La Serena to be waiting at Santiago airport. Tom Sebring will attend the SAC meeting on Wed am. Sidney Wolff will atend sometime that day as well. The entire project team will be at ground-breaking to talk to counterparts at CTIO.

One purpose of ground-breaking is to get potential donors to the site. Simkin expressed a desire to bring in their contact from Rockwell. Cecil felt this was completely appropriate and urged her to coordinate this through Paul Hunt. It would certainly be useful for the SAC to get a technology briefing from this person.
 

Project Status (Cecil)

1. Sebring  has proposed June 2 &3 for the telescope concept design review, location TBD. He proposed a Board meeting on June 4 to deal with the review. The Board has yet to respond to those dates. The SAC felt that this time interval was insufficient. The Board would only have the verbal result of the review, and it was more reasonable to allow time for the project team to respond to this while also awaiting the final written report from the reviewers.

Aug. 15 is proposed for draft RFP's to be released for comment/review. Oct. 15 is to distribute these to contactors; bids are due Nov. 15; awarded Dec. 15. Contract activity starts on or before Jan. 15, 1999. The contract for M1 fabrication/purchase may be accelerated because the Active Optics System (AOS) contractor will need a polished mirror to integrate into the mount. Krabendam will develop this contract soon. Corning remains more interested in buying back the ULE than they are in making us a mirror, so Schott is growing more attractive.

2. Eduardo Serrano is now our full-time site manager. The project will buy a 4x4 pickup for him to replace the expensive ($1K/mo) rental us now uses to travel to the site from La Serena. A partner-contributed truck would be welcome, and could be driven down if necessary to the ground-breaking (joke).

3. Baldwin reported that the site will be cleared shortly after March 10.  CTIO then expected to erect the 20-meter tall site-monitoring tower. X,y,z wind vectors will be recorded at 5 heights, once/min day & night. CTIO will study correlations between the top wind-vector (which is above the boundary layer) and those below, to establish statistics on the layer thickness. These data will be used to establish at what height we should place M1. As height increases, mechanical stiffness of the telescope decreases. Cecil noted that the telescope enclosure will likely incorporate a ``flow separator" at the level of the observing floor, a flat plate that extends upwind into the undisturbed flow to inhibit wind ``lofting" over the dome.

4. Contractor meetings: L&F is proposing hydrostatic bearings & a capstan drive. Comsat-RSI is working on a double helical-gear system which should produce a very stiff mount.  Tom thinks that both concepts are  viable, so will likely go with a performance-based spec. and seek the lowest bid. Contraves wants to bid on everything, but is competing w/ ROSI on the AOS. Comsat, L&F, & ROSI will have their design reports to us by mid/late April. Contraves will delay their report until mid-May. The reports will be repackaged and then distributed to the partners, allowing perusal before the CDR in early June.

5. Moretto accompanied Sebring to Brazil to introduce industry representatives to modern telescopes. Equatorial Systems, a Brazilian engineering firm, is coordinating potential Brazilian contractors. It appears that Brazil will be competitive for carbon-fiber fabrication (required to build up the M1 cell) and probably for steelwork. Another company makes ATM machines. These feature precise motions with many degrees of freedom inside a metal box. This resembles our Cass. instrument adapter (which routes light to the various instruments & Facility Calibration Unit at the non-Gemini Nasmyth port), so there are possibilities for Brazil here as well.

6. Schumacher and Cecil will document what they learned about porting various parts of the Gemini OCS/TCS to SOAR. They will also outline an instrument control system based on compactPCI hardware and either the VxWorks or RT-Linux realtime OS.

7. Cecil & Moretto will continue to layout the instrument adapter/selector. Moretto is now doing an end-to-end ZEMAX raytrace of SOAR with the GIRS-clone attached, to develop a Gemini-side image degradation spec and to verify preliminary results that adopting SOAR's natural RC field curvature won't compromise the performance of essentially bore-sight Gemini instruments. The telescope optical design will froze by the end of next week and several optical design documents will be released shortly thereafter. These documents will be used by Krabendam & Moretto to develop the spec. to Schott for the optimum glass-removal curves.
 

Science Outline Document

Simkin & McMahan are sorting science programs discussed by Brazil, NOAO, and at the partner meeting at MSU last August. The Brazilian & NOAO proposals are well organized. Others will require more work. A preliminary version of this edit can be circulated in 2 weeks, with the science document finalized by mid-March. This will give time for the derived instrument document to be developed in parallel, then refined and circulated for discussion before the SAC meeting in mid-April. Cecil will work on a decision timeline & circulate it to the SAC for discussion next week.

Simkin felt that there is urgency, specifically for the IR imager because a prospectus for this instrument is being written at MSU. She would like to assemble the imager proposals into a series of specs. by next week and then clean it up by early March. This will ensure that the SAC maintains full control with the tightest possible specs. This is not design by committee, simply ensuring that partner science goals are driving instrument design.

Cecil felt that the sort of science sifting that Simkin & McMahan were doing could be completed in a couple of weeks. However, he felt that we must decouple the IR imager from a specific chip until we see what the science drivers are. It was possible, though he felt unlikely, that we would end up ranking the factor of 2 increase in wavelength coverage of InSb as more important than the 4x greater area coverage provided by a 2Kx2K HgCdTe chip. Resolving issues like that was where he thought the urgency lay in sorting & evaluating science proposals. He also continued to be uncomfortable with defining instruments based on what people have done in the past. SOAR is going to open doors, so there is also room for a bottom-up approach based on novel technology and instruments.

McMahan proposed that he & Simkin spend one more week formulating the science document before emitting it to the rest of the SAC; it would be a ``strategy" document setup to lead to proposal ranking, etc. to prioritize scientific interests. The rest of the SAC agreed gratefully. Baldwin noted that the Canary Islands Telescope document was not of the type being discussed now. After making the obligatory noises about Ho, it jumped to what the instruments should do. McMahan said he had not changed his option, he felt that the scope of topics was appropriate but that the SAC needed to go deeper in the science.

Regarding a March 15th ``deadline" for the IR imager proposal: the SAC agreed that this was premature if in fact the Board had requested it. [S. Wolff told Cecil afterwards that the Board was NOT expecting a proposal then. It seems that an unsolicited  ``prospectus", not a proposal, will be delivered to the Board by  March 15th.] The SAC agreed that an IR imager and participation in the chip consortium led by UH were two separate issues.  The SAC endorsed getting into the Rockwell consortium at the $100K level, pending eventual clarification from MSU as to deliverables, chip sorting by defects, etc. The documents now in hand were: 1) a proposal from Rockwell to U. Hawaii to make chips for UH & ESO, 2) an informal note from Loh & Kuhn outlining their interpretation of what a larger consortium would expect to receive. The SAC looked forward to complete details with legally binding language that related explicitly to the enlarged consortium of which MSU would presumably be part. Until that document was reviewed, the SAC felt that SOAR wasn't obligated to pay anything to anyone.

Cecil proposed that he, Baldwin, & Diaz work on the Telescope Specifications document, which would provide the rationale for the specs. that the SAC had endorsed a few months ago. He would also work with Schumacher to document the TCS issues.