From the Director's Desk

At last the miserable weather of 2000 looks to have changed for the better, and just recently we have seen the best spell of dry weather since El Niño. Hopefully this bodes well for 2001. Since the last Newsletter the main news to report is the cancellation of the `black' time in semester 01A imposed by the 12-hour shifts due to staff shortages. This is excellent news indeed and is a great testimony to the enthusiasm of the TSSs to maintain the facility at full capability (see below).

In November, in the light of a further TSS departure, the JCMT Advisory Panel and Board considered urgent proposals to implement a rapid-action project that would provide a remote, close-up facility for the telescope. This would allow the JCMT to be staffed by a TSS at the summit for all of first shift and some of second shift, the telescope would then be left running while the TSS and observer drove down to HP, where the observer would take over operations. Close-up would take place when the day-crew arrived, or earlier if the weather deteriorated. There would be a number of safety overrides so that in the event of inclement weather, the dome would automatically close. Once the dome was closed it would not be able to be opened again from HP. This project was only possible due to some recent upgrades and the upcoming project to replace the telescope and carousel control consoles. In the first instance this remote close-up would only work with SCUBA, leaving non-SCUBA nights reduced to 12-hours for some fraction of the time. The Panel and Board approved this project in an effort to reduce the `black' time while not increasing staffing.

However, on discussion with the TSSs, Remo Tilanus found there was support to change the shift pattern so that 16-hour nights could be retained. After much intensive work, an agreed solution was found. This has been implemented from early February and will last for the entire semester with a review at the end of May. The Board was supportive of this action. Therefore, observers should now have full 16-hour nights for the entire semester, and should this experiment prove successful, this mode is expected to continue. I cannot speak too highly of the professionalism of the TSSs in working to reach this very satisfactory conclusion.

The only downside to the new pattern is that it removes TSS support from the daytime. This has caused some reorganisation of ETS functions and puts a restriction on extended observing, while not removing it altogether in times of excellent weather. The remote close-up project has not been abandoned, however; it has merely been slowed to a more reasonable pace because this will also allow extended observing to be retained. This is crucial so that we can maximise the observing time during excellent, and in particular, El Niño weather.

Over the last six months the time lost due to faults has improved, which is very welcome in itself. The Associate Director (Per Friberg) has been charged with working with the Chief Engineer and Head of Software to identify and come up with a plan to eliminate many of the niggling faults and to reduce substantially the overall fault-rate. In this light the instruments have been performing reasonably well; RxW suffered a rare failure of the D-band multiplier, while SCUBA went through a period of noisy pixels and dilution fridge problems that were eventually cured by a full warm-up and bake-out. Experience now strongly suggests that this needs to be undertaken about every four months and so in future this one-week downtime will be hard-wired into the schedule. Unfortunately, due to a number of unrelated reasons, the new holography receiver has still not been fully commissioned but as this is being written we should be very close. This will then allow us to move on to the next phase of the surface upgrade project.

Returning to SCUBA, while it continues to produce excellent and world-beating science, those users who want the photometric pixels or the 750/350 channels continue to be disappointed by their unavailability. This was discussed at the ITAC and based on the scientific priorities, time out of service and risk of the fix, the ITAC decided to continue to operate in the 850/450 mode for the coming semester. However, it was agreed that SCUBA should be taken out of service for an extended period in summer 2002 for a thorough overhaul, which will include the return of all filter modes. Observers are hereby given advanced notice of this planned downtime. We are also investigating whether we can obtain a further increase in sensitivity through new feedhorns, which have just become available through a new machining technique. If this proves feasible, then these will also be installed next summer.

I again encourage RxW applications, the dearth of which continues to baffle me given the high demand to build this excellent receiver in the first place. I am working with the ITAC to explore ways to ensure that users who obtain RxW time do get good weather.

The past few months have been very busy ones as far as the new instruments are concerned. HARP had an excellent review meeting at MRAO in late November and is on good track. This was followed by an equally successful Critical Design Review of ACSIS at Penticton in December. It looks as though ACSIS will suffer some further slippage, but will be at the JAC well in time for HARP. For both of these projects, the software interface with the JAC has become a priority and this will be addressed at an extensive meeting in Hilo in early April. SCUBA-2 has just seen the project kick-off-meeting at NIST in February. This went extremely well and it was very encouraging to see how positively the two detector development teams were working together. This project is currently going through the funding cycle in the UK and will be the focus of the JCMT Board in May. The situation for CHAMP-D on the other hand, does not look at all promising as Bonn has not been able to appoint a project manager and so the required design review scheduled for March is unlikely to take place.