Participants: Baldwin, Cecil (chair & minutes), Diaz, Dottori, Simkin. Absent: McMahan, Elston. The telecon lasted 1 hr.
S. Wolff has discussed the GNIRS clone w/ M. Mountain. They have agreed that Gemini is interested if SOAR/NOAO puts in $1M. This would buy us 1/2 the time, and includes the cost of the Durham U. image slicer, but does not include the IR on-instrument wavefront sensor (required to meet our imaging spec., provided by U. Hawaii), or the ALLADIN 1K^2 InSb array and controller. Simkin noted the importance of ensuring that the downtime required to move the instrument between the two telescopes would also be split equally with Gemini.
ALADDIN program: Gemini is continuing the foundry run at SBRC to ensure enough good chips (and spares) for all their instruments. So far 2 chips w/ 4 fully functional quadrants have been delivered (to Gemini and Subaru). A number of chips have had quadrants damaged in processing, but there are still plenty of 2- and 3-quad devices. Gemini’s existing InSb array will go into the Near-IR Imager being built at U. Hawaii. The next will go into the GNIRS. The odds are good that the yield will improve, so Gemini will end up with spares and a good 4-quad chip for the GNIRS-clone.
GNIRS-clone Issues:
Cecil has not yet passed it by the Board, but L. Daggert said it is very aggressive. Cecil saw little opportunity to contract the first year's activity because there are still SAC deliberations to be made, and partners need to approve payment schedules.
The only opportunity for contraction would be if the Board opted not to use a formal RFP (request for proposals) or external reviewers. They are very unlikely to drop the latter. Baldwin asked if it had been decided by the Board to seek multiple proposals, or was it understood that a single proposal for each instrument would come from each partner and that it was the duty of the SAC to review these to ensure that they meet partner science goals. Cecil felt it was the latter. It is probable that there would be preselected leaders for each instrument, and so one proposal for each instrument. There would still be a period extending to the end of '98 where the proposals would be iterated with the designers to ensure that instruments enable as many partner science goals as possible.
Simkin suggested that the SAC send a letter to the Board asking ``who is building what?" This needs to be resolved once and for all. Cecil said that part of his reluctance was that it appeared that UNC was unwilling to discuss anything related to instrumentation until they had hired their new instrumentalist. They were now bringing in the short list, and expected to make a decision in about a month. Brazil was also organizing. Cecil felt that the proposals should come in Sept. or Oct. This needed to be defined by the Board as well, presumably at the Rio meeting in April.
Cecil felt that the SAC should have a month or 6 weeks to deliberate on the full instrument suite, to ensure that we have a comprehensive solution. This can happen no later than November. From mid-April until August, the SAC should be refining the instrument configurations. We want the best instruments so we should be willing to accept start delays if a better team will result.
By the end of '98 everyone should know who is building what and why, leaving us with 2.7 years to do everything to be ready by first light. Of course the imagers will take less time, and the optical spectrograph more. This is however a natural staging sequence. Guide cameras could be used to work on the telescope during commissioning. It would need to get out to at least 1 micron to sample a quiet atmosphere.
One year is blocked out for design, one for fabrication. This is strictly a strawman estimate; the instrument builders will develop schedules that better meet the available institutional resources. As a fiducial, Daggert told Cecil that NOAO's SQUIID (multi-channel imager) which has few moving parts, was 10 man years (all done in 1 year.) Simkin said that MSU was planning on 3 full-time engineers, and expected that the IR imager would take 2+ years.
SOAR's imaging performance is dauntingly high-quality. It will tax the design capabilities of the partner institutions to fully exploit the telescope. The niche document shows curves of image quality for the raw telescope+enclosure degradation (0."18) as well as adding an equal amount of instrument degradation (total 0."25 in quadrature sum.)
Cecil felt that we need the same review sequence that Gemini does; these are not arbitrary hoops to jump through, they are proven ways to ensure that challenging performance goals will be met. Simkin felt that video conferencing would be very useful at that stage. Cecil agreed, noting that every month of delay in buying into that capability provides better value. He would expect to move on that in early '99. Cecil felt it was a given that the instrument builders would video conference monthly to seek commonality in mechanisms etc. where it made sense.
Cecil noted that at his presentation the day before, the Board had endorsed the idea of getting concepts from outside the consortium. [Simkin noted that Board minutes are not distributed to members of the various institutions; she felt that they should be on the Web. Cecil replied that the Board felt that some of the material was privileged. At least at UNC the astronomers got a precis as to what as discussed. This appeared right after the telecon, it was not based on the minutes that appear several days later.] As Cecil stressed, this activity is intended to familiarize the partnership with state-of-the-art concepts in spectrometers, etc. These would articulate the specific trades required to meet our science goals in specific instruments.
At present, 2 contracts are envisioned with the AAO: one to explore a fiber-fed IFU under the direction of Keith Taylor (originator of TAURUS, LDSS, 2DF, etc.), the other a tunable filter option in Moretto's optical reimager design. Both of these contracts are ready to go, and Sebring has agreed to spend the order $15K on them. Cecil had to package the contacts to get past both the SOAR and the AAO Boards, to ensure that both organizations would benefit. The AAO Board would naturally ask ``what's in it for us?" so Cecil emphasized the importance of designing a fiber-fed IFU spectrometer for a high-resolution site (very different from the criteria applied to the AAT!) The IFU would have several thousand fibers, and would feed a high-efficiency spectrometer with the range of spectral resolutions we have been discussing. It would span 50-100 arcsec^2, sampled correctly for tip/tilt stabilized seeing. The second phase asks about deployable IFU's, each with 10-20 arcsec^2. We would get first-order cost figures (in terms of FTE's) and timescales, good perhaps to 30-50%. We should have preliminary information on the 1st phase by the SAC meeting, and the full report by July. They have no promises for further contracts, design or construction.
It was expected that there will be discussions at the SPIE meeting in Kona with Taylor, and also with people from Durham U. The latter may lead to eventual design work on an optical image-slicer. But, the slicer activity should wait until the spectrometer design phase. Simkin noted that the near-UV was a driver for the optical spectrometer so we must know how the slicer impacts transmission. Cecil noted that in the case of the GNIRS, the Durham slicer was a retrofit to an existing design. This imposed a number of different constraints.
The SAC agreed that emitting these contracts was a good approach, with the understanding that the involved parties realize that there is little likelihood of getting a construction contract. Cecil felt that sub-system contracts were possible, e.g. for a massive IFU whose construction would otherwise needlessly divert the SOAR partners from more pressing tasks and wouldn't build up a useful capability of broad application. Brazil might want to contract w/ the AAO to build this if Brazil wishes to proceed with the spectrometer.
Not much progress here because of Simkin's teaching load and a workstation crash. McMahan will take on some of this now that his workload elsewhere has backed off a bit. Baldwin reported on their ``eavesdrop" of the Gemini discussion on the first set of SCIDAR runs at the CTIO 1.5m telescope, and the correlation of these with data from balloons launched from C. Pachon. [Jack placed file scidar980303.ps at the SAC Web site. This supercedes what was reported on at this SAC telecon.]