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A Brazilian bump in the road for E-ELT

January 22, 2012 by

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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JWST in The Guardian

July 12, 2011 by

I wrote a little something for the Guardian’s science blogs section on the JWST issues, here it is. I really appreciate all the retweets, facebook posts, emails and comments, and it’s been a nice experience to work with the Guardian Science team.

I’m excited that I’ve been able to help with making James Webb something of a talking point here in Europe as well, although I wish the circumstances were different.

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Crunch Time for NASA? (With updates)

July 6, 2011 by

My twitter timeline is on fire with news that the House Appropriations Committee in the US just released its fiscal year 2012 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill, which will be voted on by the subcommittee tomorrow (July 7). This bill funds the Department of Commerce, the Department of Justice, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and other related agencies. It also proposes to pull  the plug on JWST.

To the best of my knowledge, despite lots of rumours flying around, there never was any serious discussion over cancelling JWST. It was a scenario that had to be considered given the criticism over bad management and cost overruns – but as far as I was aware, this was an academic exercise. The Decadal Survey and every other similar roadmap placed the highest priority on JWST, and everyone, scientists as well as politicians, work under the assumption that JWST will fly.

So…. I don’t really have anything to say on this. I’m writing this to ask for information. Who knows more? Is this some political hard-balling hoop-jumpery?

Update:

An email from our European PI for MIRI gave little extra factual information over what’s being talked and written online, but urged us to support our US colleagues who will have to mobilize and fight to keep JWST alive. Also something about the “international collaboration” card ESA will “almost certainly” play if and when it’s called for. Meanwhile within the project it’s business as usual. Remember we’re in the middle of our final all-important flight test campaign at the Rutherford Labs In Didcot before we deliver MIRI to NASA later this year – lovely data are pouring in, lots to do.

Links (no longer a complete list but I’ll try to post anything official or particularly interesting or relevant):

Reaction from AURA

Official reaction from the American Astronomical Society (AAS) – very strong words of support for the mission

NY Times piece by Dennis Overbye with reactions from Matt Mountain, Tod Lauer

Nice by Jonathan Amos on the Beeb, words from NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver

Blog post by Andy Lawrence

Brief blog post on Cosmic Variance

Skymania story

Space News story Nature news story

Science news story

Stein Sigurdsson

astropixie

Well informed piece on Space Policy Online

Risa Wechsler on Cosmic Variance

Here’s a Save the James Webb Space Telescope facebook page you can like, and a twitter feed to follow.

 

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Honey, I Shrunk The Telescope!

June 16, 2011 by

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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No More Dr Nice Guy

September 18, 2010 by

Britain is in the throes of massive cuts in public spending. Science isn’t escaping the axe, and with budgets already squeezed in recent years this is likely to lead to excellent scientific research losing its funding.

At a time when many other countries are upping their investment in scientific research to stimulate economic growth, the UK’s move could well be an own goal that will stifle the country’s potential for innovation in years to come. A rather basic error in a speech by business secretary Vince Cable about the country’s research spending did little to instill confidence in the government amongst the scientific community.

A number of concerned and angry scientists have set up the Science is Vital campaign and are organising a rally in London on 9  October under the motto “No more Dr Nice Guy” – a fab slogan. So if you are a working British scientist or you just care about science in Britain, sign up for the campaign. The Facebook group is here with over 1600 members already, the twitter hashtag is #scienceisvital, some more useful links are here, and if you want to be more actively involved, this tweet may be of interest.

I won’t be in the UK at the time so will have to miss the event, but I’ll be cheering from across the Channel.

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