NOAO at the Science Frontiers of New Worlds, New Horizons

by David Silva, NOAO Director

We welcome your thoughts on any aspect of this article, including your views on questions such as:

• What are our major challenges in the coming decade? (Either those of NOAO specifically or the US community in general.)

• Are we addressing these questions from the right point of view?

• What is your highest priority in the coming decade? (Or what should NOAO’s priorities be?)

• What do you want to see as an outcome of the Portfolio Review? (Or what should NOAO be aiming for as an outcome of the review?)

• More generically: what are we doing right or wrong?

To enable community discussion, we have created an on-line forum. Comments entered there will be posted immediately. Comments sent to currents@noao.edu will not be posted unless requested. We look forward to hearing from you!

The upcoming NSF Astronomy Portfolio Review will use the 2010 Decadal Survey report, New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics (NWNH), as a guide in making decisions about NSF strategic investment over the next 10 years. In particular, the NSF review seeks to determine “…the critical capabilities needed to make progress…” at the NWNH Science Frontiers as well as “…what combination of new facilities and programs plus existing – but evolved – facilities and programs will best deliver those capabilities within strict budgetary constraints”.

How does the current NOAO Long-Range Plan (LRP) measure up? Our LRP describes how NOAO and the research community it serves will have major leadership roles over the next 5 years and beyond in providing, operating and utilizing unique capabilities and facilities for the three NWNH Science Objectives: Cosmic Dawn, New Worlds, and Physics of the Universe. These concepts and designs are the result of decade-long planning and optimization, completed in concert with NSF support and community input from a wide variety of sources including the ReSTAR (Renewing Small Telescopes for Astronomical Research), ALTAIR (Access to Large Telescopes for Astronomical Instruction and Research), and Future of NOAO committees. Indeed, because of that close engagement with the community-at-large and NSF, NOAO is now well positioned to provide and enable scientific leadership in the decade ahead.

NOAO and the O/IR System Today

Today, NSF MPS Astronomy invests directly about $60M in the US OIR System through NOAO, Gemini, Telescope System Instrumentation Program (TSIP), and a variety of other programs (e.g., new facility design and development, Sloan-III research programs). Additional investment comes from the NSF Astronomy grants program. The NSF investment leverages a large investment of non-NSF funding from private, state, national and international sources (e.g., partnerships such as WIYN, SOAR, Gemini, Keck, and LSST, to name only a few). As a result, it enhances a world-best OIR system and enables a rich scientific harvest in terms of highly cited breakthrough papers (e.g., the accelerating universe), number of papers published, number of early career scientists supported, and levels the playing field for all qualified researchers through open access. An increased emphasis on large, rich, open survey datasets in the years ahead can only improve that return-on-investment, as foreshadowed by the enormous scientific return-on-investment from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

Enabled by NSF investment, NOAO, Gemini, and other US OIR System facilities provide access via peer review to more than 1500 scientists per year from small undergraduate teaching colleges, large public and private universities, and major DOE and NASA centers. The Dark Energy Survey (DES), the Big Baryonic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BigBOSS), and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Science Collaborations have or will engage hundreds more researchers, many from the US and international physics communities. As an ensemble, this research community is extraordinarily diverse, reaching all of the groups considered to be under-represented in the allied STEM fields by NSF, especially during the critical early-year phases when young scientists are establishing their independence and preparing to compete in the academic or commercial marketplace for jobs.

Key areas of scientific leadership: 2020

Cost-efficient stewardship of previous Federal investment, broad and open engagement with the community-at-large, and building on past success while embracing new scientific frontiers have well prepared NOAO to lead and to enable scientific leadership in the decade ahead. It is no accident that the NOAO Long-Range Plan is already well aligned with NWNH. It is a result of close engagement over many years with an active community of researchers at the scientific frontiers.

The characterization of dark energy and dark matter in the early universe will more accurately constrain the development of structure, the essential precursor to formation of galaxies and all that they contain. Over time, NOAO scientists and facilities have played fundamental roles in the discovery of “missing mass” in stellar systems, giant luminous arcs in clusters, the accelerating universe, and hence the roles of dark matter and dark energy in the evolution and mass-energy budget of the universe. From that foundation comes our current scientific and technical involvement in three major new surveys: the DES at the Blanco 4-m (2012 – 2017), BigBOSS at the Mayall 4-m (2017 – 2021), and LSST (2019 – 2028). These surveys will provide the community with the essential data foreseen in NWNH and other national planning reviews, such as the DOE HEPAP Particle Astrophysics Scientific Assessment Group and the NASA Beyond Einstein: From Big Bang to Black Holes reviews. Given likely launch delays in ESA’s Euclid and NASA’s WFIRST, DES and BigBOSS will be the foremost dark energy characterization experiments of this decade. They will also provide massive, rich, open datasets for investigating a host of modern problems in astrophysics by a large research community beyond the parent DES, BigBOSS, and LSST science collaborations.

Among other things, the exploration and characterization of the time domain will catalog the vast majority of asteroids potentially hazardous to life on Earth, reveal new classes of exploding stars, detect numerous microlensing events throughout the Local Group, and find rare events such as stellar disruptions by central black holes in distant galaxies. NOAO and Gemini facilities are already heavily used for follow-up observations of time-variable objects found by such facilities as SWIFT, Palomar Transient Factory, and Catalina Sky Survey. DES and (dramatically) LSST will each increase the number of transient triggers and the pressure for follow-up support from 4-m and 8-m class facilities. Using lessons learned from today’s projects, NOAO is leading the development of instruments and processes needed by community investigators for LSST follow-up observations using capabilities located throughout the US OIR System, both north and south of the equator. NOAO is also deeply involved in LSST science and technology development activities, again preparing for our role in supporting LSST operations and scientific exploitation towards the end of this decade.

Exoplanet characterization and the study of their parent stars will reveal the composition of exoplanet atmospheres and the extent of the habitable zones of their parent stars. The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) will become available during this LRP period and will allow scientists to characterize dozens of Jovian class planets, through a combination of key projects and PI-class investigations. Meanwhile, the precise determination of the physical properties of hundreds of parent stars identified by NASA Kepler and other missions and surveys will be possible using the new generation of optical (Mayall/KOSMOS, Blanco/COSMOS, Gemini/GHOS) and near-IR (Gemini/FLAMINGOS-2, Blanco/TripleSpec) spectrographs that will be deployed during this LRP period.

In-depth knowledge of the nature of stellar populations in our Milky Way and its numerous dwarf satellites will be a major arena of exploration enabled by BigBOSS on the Mayall. As has been amply demonstrated by SDSS and the community exploitation of its stellar spectra (obtained during grey and bright time when the primary dark time project could not be executed), well-understood massive samples of medium-resolution spectra allow us to determine the basic parameters describing the stars (temperature, surface gravity, and metallicity), as well as characterize their [alpha-element/Fe] and [C/Fe] ratios. An essentially unlimited number of interesting stellar targets from the SDSS and PanSTARRS photometric catalogs will already be in place in the era of BigBOSS. Accurate radial velocities from BigBOSS, coupled with exquisite parallax distances and proper motions to be obtained with the Gaia mission (which will not obtain radial velocities for stars fainter then 16th magnitude, while BigBOSS will be able to deliver quality spectra to fainter than 20th magnitude), will enable full space motions to be determined for truly enormous numbers of stars. This powerful combination of six-dimensional phase-space information with chemical abundances, sometimes referred to as Galactic Archaeology, will provide detailed knowledge of the early stages of galaxy formation and chemical evolution at a level of detail not approachable by any other means.

These scientific opportunities will be enabled by well-established scientific and technological collaborations between NOAO and university-based groups (e.g. Ohio State, Cornell, our WIYN, SOAR, and SMARTS partners, etc.), other US-led observatories (e.g. Gemini, Keck, and other operators of 3 – 10-m class telescopes), other US national science centers (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, SLAC), foreign institutions (e.g. Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica, Brazil), major international science collaborations (e.g., LSST, DES, BigBOSS) and – especially – our dynamic and world-leading user community.

Finally, experience teaches us a fundamental lesson. Unknown unknowns, sudden and unexpected breakthroughs, sometimes called black swans – impossible to predict but often the most important – will emerge in the coming decade. The discovery of the ubiquitous presence of dark matter and dark energy are the quintessential illustrations of this lesson. Because such discoveries are unpredictable, NOAO deploys excellent general-purpose instruments (including the Dark Energy Camera and the BigBOSS instrument) and then through an open access process unleashes creative minds to use those instruments for exploration. A strong national observatory dedicated to open-access research and affiliated with other strong US-dominated facilities such as Gemini maximizes the likelihood that the right mind, regardless of who they are or where they work, will connect to the right capability to make those big leaps forward.

NOAO and the US O/IR System tomorrow

NOAO embraces the strong evolution implied by NWNH as necessary to maintain scientific leadership within constrained budgets. Indeed, our publicly available planning and implementation documents since the 2006 Senior Review have anticipated such evolution (e.g., the Future of NOAO committee report) and helped NOAO and the community it serves to prepare for continued scientific leadership as we move forward together.

By 2015, NOAO sees a strong US OIR national observatory that is organized around an LSST under construction, the US share of Gemini (at least 65%), and large survey machines at the Mayall and Blanco 4-m telescopes. Major, wide-field surveys at the Blanco, Mayall, and (by 2020) LSST will provide massive, rich data sets that can be used to address a broad range of research topics on an open-access basis. As also suggested by NWNH, NOAO believes that closer organizational ties between Gemini, NOAO, and LSST would minimize annual cost while maximizing scientific return-on-investment.

Through that enhanced national observatory, individual investigators and small teams would have access via peer review to more than 350 nights per year on 8-m class telescopes and more than 500 nights per year on 4-m class telescopes with a broad range of work horse instruments. While such access is independently valuable, it will also be important as a resource to interpret observations done at other wavelengths by other facilities. In many cases it will be impossible, without the OIR data, to develop a complete physical understanding of the observed phenomena.

That strong national observatory will not exist in isolation. It will be embedded within a strong US OIR System consisting of a broad range of non-Federal observatories from 3-m to 10-m in aperture. Continued Federal investment in instrumentation and community access to these facilities through ReSTAR and TSIP, as well as eventually the Mid-Scale Initiatives program recommended in the NWNH report, would be a very cost-effective way to maintain US scientific leadership across a broad geographical landscape, especially when combined with investment from state governments, private foundations, and private individuals. This is especially true given the unfortunate possibility that the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), and James Webb Space Telescope projects will not reach scientific fruition until after 2020 and operations support for HST is currently uncertain beyond 2015.

The existing suite of capable workhorse instruments is being augmented in the next three years by world-leading capabilities including ultra-wide-field optical imaging (Blanco, WIYN), multi-object near-IR spectroscopy (LBT, Magellan, Keck, Gemini), ground-layer correction (LBT, SOAR), arc-minute scale adaptive optics imaging and multi-object spectroscopy (Gemini-S), and very high-Strehl, very high-contrast imaging (Gemini-S). Much of this investment has come from NSF, in whole or part.

Towards a decade of excellence

Since the 2005-2006 Senior Review, NOAO has laid a strong foundation for leadership at the NWNH Science Frontiers through support from NSF and continuous engagement with a broad set of scientists in the national and international community. We look forward to a decade where NOAO, Gemini, and the rest of the US OIR System work together with an expanded research community as well as NSF and other funding sources to build on existing infrastructure in a cost effective manner to enable transformational science.

We welcome your thoughts on any aspect of this article, including your views on questions such as:

• What are our major challenges in the coming decade? (Either those of NOAO specifically or the US community in general.)

• Are we addressing these questions from the right point of view?

• What is your highest priority in the coming decade? (Or what should NOAO’s priorities be?)

• What do you want to see as an outcome of the Portfolio Review? (Or what should NOAO be aiming for as an outcome of the review?)

• More generically: what are we doing right or wrong?

To enable community discussion, we have created an on-line forum. Comments entered there will be posted immediately. Comments sent to currents@noao.edu will not be posted unless requested. We look forward to hearing from you!