Minutes
of the 35th Subaru Advisory Committee
Date:
26 Sep., 2001, 11:00-17:00 JST
Place:
NAOJ TV conference room (Mitaka and Hilo)
Participants:
H.Ando, M.Iye(Chair), T.Ichikawa, S.Okamura, Kataza, H.Karoji, S.Sato, N.Sugiyama, M.Tamura,
Nakano, M.Hayashi, T.Mahara, T.Yamashita, S.Ichikawa, K.Sekiguchi, T.Takata,
J.Nishikawa, S..Miyama, A. TokunagaAB. McLaren
1.
Minutes of SAC 34 was approved; Iye, 35-1
2.
Status reports of Subaru Telescope;
Ando, 35-2
First
Common use operation was closed down for two months starting from the beginning
of August and major revision on the M1 fixation mechanism was made. M1 was
re-aluminized using this chance. AO saw its first light in Dec,
2000.
(High lights) Infrared imaging of the
Subaru Deep Field caught 90 % of all the observable galaxies. Seven supernovae at high red shift were
found. Numerous low mass objects were detected in S106 star-forming region. Eu was measured in metal deficient
stars.
16
papers were published since the first light in the year 2000, more than 23
papers are submitted for publication.
(Engineering)
Revision of the M1 Fixation mechanism, M1 re-aluminization, replacement of the
absolute encoder of the alt axis, Reduction of telescope vibration, Improvement
in the tracking accuracy, Control system upgrade, and Improvement of chopping M2
were main activities during the last 6 months.
(Management)
Total number of staff amounts to 71. Total annual budget for the fiscal year
2001 is 4 billion yen and the budget for travel is 0.13 billion yen. Transfer of
additional four staff from Mitaka to Hilo is planned. A budget cut of 10% is anticipated for
every institute and universities beginning next year. Internal adjustment to support ALMA
project and others sparing the Subaru budget might be
necessary.
(Telescope
Time) Status of operation is reported.
(Forthcoming)
All of the eight instruments will be offered for open use. FMOS and MOIRCS are still under
development phase and applications of PI instruments are under consideration. A
long term plan for improvement of the telescope performance and procurement of
detector array are also under consideration.
3.
General status of NAOJ (Miyama)
Financial prospects, situation for
restructuring NAOJ to an agency, and the scopes of promoting ALMA project were
explained.
4.
Telescope Time Allocation committee
Okamura, 35-3a
TAC
met on 1-2, Aug. received 160 proposals requesting 337 nights in total. To
reduce the load for referees in extragalactic astronomy, regrouping of
categories were made and TAC decided to accept 29 proposals for 47 nights, of
which 2 proposals for 5 nights were international proposals. TAC advises SAC to
accept one proposal under a category of "Target of Opportunity TOO", which is
not counted in the 47 nights. The basic policy of the TOO assignment should be
established and understood by UH.
The procedure for accepting proposals using PI instruments was
discussed. Only those proposals
that went through the technical assessment by the Observatory Staff and the
science merit assessment (made by the TAC) can be considered for further
scheduling of the telescope time.
TAC
decided to recommend SAC to establish a scheme to accept proposals requesting
more than three nights from S02A (35-9b), considering the increase of nights
assignable to open use.
5.
Summary of S01BOpen Use Yamada, Tamura, 35-3b
Support scientists are included as
members of the technical assessment of submitted proposals and detailed
information on observations are passed on to SS to make observation more
effective. Statistics of submitted
and accepted proposals for each instruments and category of observation was
reported.
6.
Questionnaire on S00-S01A observations; Yamada, 35-3c
More
than half obtained satisfactory data but some did not. Careful analysis should
be made to interpret the main cause of failure. In order to avoid insufficient
assignment of nights to accomplish a particular program, it was advised to quest
declaring the minimum nights to be assigned in the
proposal.
7. R&D subcommittee; Sato,
35-4
Committee
held on 19 Sep reviewed 10 proposals for a budget of 80 million yen and endorsed
3 of them to go forward, with 5 under continued
assessment.
8. Data archive system and replacement of
super computer; Takata, S.Ichikawa 35-5
The status of the SMOKA system and its
access rate by users was reported. It was proposed to start the procedures for
making the data, taken during the function test observations of telescope and
instruments, available to the public with a permission obtained from the PIs of
each program.
The replacement of the computer system
will start from Feb 2002. It is foreseen that the disk capacity and CPU
performance will be 10-20 times higher than present.
9.
Status report of FMOS; Maihara,
35-4a
Contribution
from UK counterpart is slightly behind the schedule but otherwise the progress
is in a sound state. New optical
design allows improvement in PSF.
10.
Status report of MOIRCS; T.Ichikawa 35-4b
Design
and construction is more or less on schedule and system integration is expected
to finish by March 2003.
11.
Arrangement on UH88 and UKIRT; Tamura and Sekiguchi,
35-5
15 proposal for 55 nights were received
and 12 proposals for 26 nights were accepted by the temporary AC summoned for
UH88 time.
SIRIUS was used on 4 Japanese proposals
for 10 nights and additional 4 UH proposals for 5 nights were accepted. The opinions and requests from the users
community to include external members in the temporary UH88 TAC was discussed
and it was agreed to consider this problem by consulting with the Committee for
Optical and Infrared Astronomy, that oversees the open use
policy.
As for UKIRT, finalizing the wording of
the draft of MOU is under way.
12.
Future plans
12.1.
Situation around the Subaru Telescope; Iye 35-7a
Plans
for Extremely large telescopes, Interferometers, SPICA; Space mid-Infrared
observatory, Infrared astrometry satellite, Utilization of the space station,
Projects to search for Extraterrestrial planets were briefly
reviewed.
12.2.
OHANA; Nishikawa 35-7b
The
concept and the progress of combining telescopes on Mauna Kea were introduced.
NAOJ might participate in this program by sharing the role of developing the
delay lines.
13. Observatory time and performance
verification time; Ando 35-8a
Ando
proposed to prolong the assignment of the telescope time for the observatory
staff and for the performance verification of open use instruments that was
supposed to complete by the end of S02b, considering the delay in
schedule.
Regarding the UH share of nights, there
was a repeated discussion and SAC chair asked both the directors to talk again
to come to an friendly compromise.
14.
Open use instruments and TOO; Ando
It
was proposed to offer all the open use instruments for the next semester S02a
and this proposal was welcomed by the SAC. As for the TOO, Ando proposed two
approaches; namely A) as for Galactic supernova or prominent comets etc.
telescope time can be assigned from the observatory time under the discretion of
the Subaru Director and
B)
as for example GRBs, the nights assigned should be counted as a part of nights
for open use.
These
policies were approved by the SAC.
It was argued that to make the flexible observation possible TOO
proposals should identify the observatory staff
responsible.
15. Subaru Observatory Project; Ando
35-10
The
scope and the procedure to identify concrete programs were proposed. A task
force nominated will take care the coordination of the practical plan for
devoting about 2/3 of the time guaranteed for telescope builders and the
observatory staff for the coming two year period.
16. Nomination of new TAC
members
T.
Maihara was elected as the chair of the TAC. Considering the nomination from the
GOPIRA and trying to keep half the members to remain in the TAC to avoid
discontinuous change of policies, SAC nominated the following
candidates:
Category 1(Solar system) Tadashi
Mukai
Category 2(Stars and the Galaxy)
Yoshikazu Nakada
Category 3(Nebulae and
Interstellar matter) Motohide Tamura
Category 4(Nearby galaxies and
AGN) Koji Ohta
Category 5(Clusters of galaxies
and cosmology) Sadanori Okamura
Pan-category Yasushi Suto, Nobuo
Arimoto, Nobuyuki Kawai
Note
added: Since Koji Oath serves as the chair of Okayama TAC, SAC accepted his
decline and elected Michitoshi; Yoshida for the Category 4. All the members
kindly accepted to serve for the next term.
17.
Subaru User Meeting; Yamada
Subaru
Users Meeting will be held during 11-12 Dec (JST) at Mitaka with a TV link to
Hilo and other sites. Coordinators are W.Aoki, T.Ichikawa, M.Imanishi and
T.Yamada
Additional
notes
i)
To clarify the concrete procedures for archiving the observed data (35-5),
additional discussion was made and it was agreed to simplify the procedure to
reduce the actual load on staff working for archiving the
data.
The key points of change
are
(1) In principle all the data are by
default mounted and made available on the Subaru archive system after 18 months
of observation.
(2) Any particular data, that are not to
be made available, should be requested to the archive team to postpone the
release date stating clear reasons for doing so.
(3) This policy change should be
announced and notified to the community appropriately.
ii)
Subaru Director, Ando, reported the results of negotiation with IfA director,
Kudritzki, on the number of nights to be assigned to UH, and the SAC accepted
this report.
iii)
As for the framework of the intensive programs, the following scheme was
proposed and approved.
Any intensive program can last for
one year and the number of nights requested per program should not exceed 10
nights. Maximum of 10 nights will
be reserved for S02A. The program review will be made by a special joint meeting
consisting of TAC and SAC members.
The policy for S02B will be separately discussed
later.