We had 3 speakers: 

Pat McCarthy — GMT update;  highlighted community science meetings, and GMT white paper to enable community science.

Christophe Dumas — TMT update;  gave timeline for site decision (also in Mark’s talk); highlighted call for 2nd generation instrument white papers. 

Courtney Dressing — Exoplanet Instrumentation with TMT & GMT;  gave a really nice overview of the exoplanet science case and the complementary GMT/TMT instrument suite. 

Then I presented attached slide as a discussion point; we spent a good ~30-45 minutes talking about the first topic as a group and then divided into two groups to talk about instrumentation and GMT/TMT synergies (north/south but also instrumentation suites), and GSMT syngeries with other major projects (LSST, ALMA, JWST) and need for archive/data management. 

On the first point, we focused on how to develop a unified strategy for getting NSF/2020 Decadal/community support for US participation in the GSMT. This touched on the idea of key projects, with participation/time contributions from all partners, that would produce large cohesive datasets available for a variety of science projects. Some also expressed the desire to have PI access for small projects; we talked about having the GSMTs as part of the NOAO O/IR system, with the ability to request time on both Gemini and GSMT for a single project. We also talked about the differences in the first instruments planned for each telescope, and how you might need the full set of capabilities; the desire to target rare objects (exoplanet systems, very high redshift galaxies) also point to access to both hemispheres. 

Bob and Mark participated in the instrumentation discussion, so they can comment on how that progressed. 

In the LSST/JWST/ALMA and archive discussion,  we talked about the need to follow-up the cool stuff that would develop in the early 2020’s from these telescopes; e.g. JWST will certainly find high-redshift galaxies that will require 30-m class telescope for spectroscopy; JWST lower spectroscopic and spatial resolution and lack of optical coverage will naturally lead to 30-m class follow-up targets. ALMA’s highest spatial resolution will only be matched by GSMTs; LSST will also find faint transient classes that require bigger glass. There will be many opportunities for follow-up/additional exoplanet work.   We agreed that TMT/GMT need good archives, that played well with NOAO DataLab, LSST, JWST/MAST. Key projects based on the primary science themes could be a good step towards making GSMT archival data interesting and accessible to the broader US community. 

I left the meeting thinking that a productive path forward would be to write ~3-4 science cases (e.g. exoplanets, first light galaxies, transients, and the Galaxy) that describe the science landscape that we expect to develop in the early 2020s fromJWST, TESS, ALMA, LSST, GAIA, etc and the need for GSMT access to answer the anticipated next steps, including the arguments for complementary instrumentation suites and bi-hemisphere access. This could be developed as proto-type GSMT key projects (involving both telescopes) and describing the resulting archival databases, and the potential for PI-lead related projects. 

I think the most important question when we reported back was “why does the _US community_ need to be the ones to do this?” The answer (I think) is  “the system”; NOAO/NCAO can act as the broker between TMT/GMT, pooling together the resources (instrumentation, expertise, sky-access, archives) to produce the most efficient and strongest science programs to answer the science questions of the late 2020’s.