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A Brazilian bump in the road for E-ELT

January 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In recent years the E-ELT project, Europe’s flagship next-generation optical observatory, seems to have gone from strength to strength: in 2010-2011, ESO Council officially gave the green light to the baseline technical design of the telescope (with the primary mirror slightly reduced in size), several member countries pledged their support for the project, others announced substantial investments into the development of hardware and instrumentation, and crucially, membership fees from giant new member state Brazil looked set to provide a major boost to the project’s financial coffers.

But apparently the E-ELT has hit a snag. This article in Brazilian publication Veja talks about Brazil’s failure to ratify the accession to ESO and support for the E-ELT project because of financial difficulties in 2011. Although an agreement was signed between ESO and the then science minister of Brazil in December 2010, Brazil’s parliament has yet to give its approval. Since then, Brazil’s been through general elections, and the new science minister hasn’t been forthcoming in continuing this approval process.

As Brazil’s contribution to ESO is crucial for the project to go ahead as long as no other new members join, the European members’ governments cannot now commit until Brazil formally comes into the club, and the project has been put on hold. ESO Director-General Tim De Zeeuw made some strong statements to the press about Brazil dragging its feet on the ratification, saying that the current accession conditions cannot be guaranteed beyond mid-2012, and new countries are lines up to join ESO if Brazil drop out. The article lists Australia, Israel, Russia, Poland and Estonia as potential new members.

An awkward point is that following the initial agreement in late 2010, Brazilian astronomers were already given full access to ESO telescope time. If Brazil now fail to ratify their accession, that privilege may be revoked again. That would be a big shame for their observers, who may have already planned multi-semester projects on ESO’s telescopes.

I can imagine that ESO really (really!) don’t want to start having negotiations with new member states at this point, as that’s likely to set the project back even further. Meanwhile the instrumentation community in Europe is working hard to keep the instrumentation projects for the new telescope alive, funded and staffed before getting the go ahead for the next phase of development.  I hope it happens soon!

Thanks to friendly Portuguese colleague Elisabete da Cunha for translating the article.

Image: Swinburne Astronomy Productions/ESO

 

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Kick-Off for ALMA

October 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

ESO‘s first call for proposals for the brand-new Atacama Large Millimeter Array earlier this year sparked a frenzy of proposal writing. Even though not all the antennae are in place yet, and the wavelength coverage is still limited, astronomers are hugely excited about the new millimeter facility coming online. The result of many years’ work by a huge international collaboration, ALMA is arguably one of the first of a new generation of mega-facilities in astronomy.

For the first round of observations, ESO requested short proposals rather than large programmes, particularly with some headline-grabbing potential to showcase ALMA’s capabilities to the world. With the start of observations just last month, ESO and its US and Japanese partners in ALMA, NRAO and NAOJ, organised some events for the press to welcome ALMA to the world. There’s been lots of nice media coverage of the array in its spectacular location and its first image.

I’m a little late to the story but as I keep seeing nice images and videos I thought I’d post a few things up here anyway.

Below is a video from Astronomy Now with Emily Baldwin at Chajnantor. The Guardian have this neat infographic about ALMA, and a good article-with-video. BBC also had a number of cool videos.

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Pluto’s Increased Entourage

July 23, 2011 By 1 Comment

NASA and ESA released this great picture from the Hubble Space Telescope this week, showing tiny Pluto’s entourage of moons, imaged twice with a week apart. Three of these were already known – Charon, Nix and Hydra – but Hubble managed to spot a fourth one in there too. It has a diameter of somewhere between 13 and 34 km, roughly 100 times smaller than the best-known moon Charon. The new moon been given the preliminary name P4, which will be replaced by something a little more meaningful in due course. Very neat!

With this, I’m off on holiday for a couple of weeks. No blogging, here or elsewhere.

Image: NASA/ESA/M. Showalter

 

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Betelgeuse Blows

June 23, 2011 By 4 Comments

Betelgeuse as seen in the near-infrard with NACO (inner circle), and in the mid-infrared with VISIR

This post was chosen as an Editor's Selection for ResearchBlogging.orgTake a look at Betelgeuse like you’ve never seen it before. Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the sky and the red jewel in the crown of Orion. It’s the prototypical red supergiant star – a cool, bloated star that’s approaching the end of its lifetime. As it runs out of fuels to burn inside its core, the star struggles to hold on to its outer layers and ejects huge quantities of material as it approaches its final end, a cataclysmic supernova.

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Honey, I Shrunk The Telescope!

June 16, 2011 By 3 Comments

Rumours had been going round for a while that the European Extremely Large Telescope, ESO‘s next generation optical telescope, might get a bit of a trim in size. This week we finally saw that confirmed: first there was this article by Govert Schilling in ScienceInsider ahead of this week’s meeting of ESO Council, and today ESO itself issued a press release about Council’s endorsement of the new plans.

Instead of 42 metres, the E-ELT primary mirror will now measure 39.3 m. That’s a pretty random number, right? I haven’t seen the plans so I’m not sure exactly what is planned – I hope to see some more details soon. It sounds like the overall optical design will also be tweaked to give a smaller (=faster) f-ratio, which gives a compacter overall design. So the telescope enclosure, which is about the size of a football stadium, can also be reduced in size. With these relatively small modifications, ESO can save quite a bit of the community’s cash – around 200 million euro according to the ScienceInsider piece.

Some additional contributions will however still be required in the years to come from the member states.

I think ESO made a smart decision. It must have been disappointing for many involved to come down from the now iconic 42-m design that huge amounts of work have gone into, both within ESO and in the rest of the community. It will certainly be burned forever into a corner of my brain, after my years of working on METIS. But in the current economic climate it would be hard to get big increases in contributions from its members – I imagine the UK in particular would have entirely incapable of that.

Clever new members Brazil, whose accession to ESO essentially provided the required funds to go ahead with the E-ELT, secured an exemption from these increases. Their involvement signals a pretty exciting time for South American astronomy as well.

The slight but not insignificant reduction in science performance is a reasonable price to pay for keeping the telescope within a realistic budget and timeline – with first light planned for 2022. It’s unclear which of the US-based ELT projects, the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope (such snazzy looking websites!), will see the light and on what timescales, but it’s fair to assume that whatever happens there, ESO will not want the E-ELT to be far behind its US competitor(s).

And, speaking of budgets and timelines, the delay to the launch of James Webb now interestingly means that the ELT’s are likely to be its direct contemporaries, rather than coming online towards the end of JWST’s lifetime. This gives us the mouthwatering prospect of tackling our research questions over a huge parameter space in spatial and spectral resolution and sensitivity – simultaneously!

Construction on the new telescope will start next January. Exciting stuff.

Image: ESO

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