Participants: Baldwin (chair & minutes), Diaz, Simkin, McMahan
Sue expressed her frustration at having received no feedback on her document "The SOAR-Blanco-Gemini S Triad" which was put on the website in December. It turned out that we had all read it, but mostly because of interruptions due to Christmas vacation and summer vacation in Brazil, had not made comments to her.
Then Sue went on to say that this document is not a suitable basis for the Science Requirements document in any case. Sue and Bob both feel that we should be writing a document which refers much more directly to specific scientific projects or examples of science, as a way of establishing the performance requirements for SOAR. Jack (your faithful scribe) found it difficult to understand exactly what sort of thing was desired, in terms of level of detail or what questions we were supposed to be answering. Sue gave as an example that we could give a description of JHK imaging of globular clusters, where we would know the field density and could then derive the required sampling.
Bob offered the following document as a good example of what we should produce: "Gran Telescopio Canarias Conceptual Design". This document is ~140 pages long, with 20 pages on the science case and 7 pages on instruments. Bob will scan those two sections and put them on the web site for the rest of us to look at.
Sue agreed to write an outline of the document she would like to see, before the next telecon, so that the rest of us could have something definite to react to.
Sue then said she felt that three separate documents are actually needed:
We then briefly discussed Tom's desire to have some straw-man instrument designs that he could make sure his telescope design would handle. Bob expressed some skepticism that very much was really needed here, Sue felt that weights, moments and sizes needed to be estimated, while Jack felt that Tom has a valid need for a straw-man optical design so that he can be sure that his conceptua telescopel design will really handle the sort of instruments we are likely to finally build.
The action items were for Sue to write out enough of an outline of the science document so that the rest of us can have a clear idea of what blanks we would have to fill in, and for Bob to put on the web page the chapters from the Grand Canaries Telescope document.