UNITED KINGDOM INFRARED TELESCOPE

Issue 10, Spring 2002

Top End

There are two profound differences between this newsletter and the one which preceded it. On the one hand we are pleased to report the successful commissioning and PATT usage of Michelle on UKIRT, while on the other we must also record the sad news of the death of Sidney Arakaki - a respected, well-liked and long-standing member of the JAC staff.

This issue includes a look back at the Michelle commissioning and includes articles on the science which is emerging from the instrument's early stages on UKIRT. The weather has not been helpful. Entire weeks have been lost to storms, and the same weather has also revealed the full vulnerability of the instrument's window to water damage. The first window failure, in December, was dealt with in exemplary manner by UKIRT staff, and we are in the process of ensuring that it will not recur. We are grateful to all 02A Michelle observers for their extremely helpful attitude and patience during the early shared-risks period of this new and highly complex instrument. See the report from the Michelle team for more details.

There are major changes ahead, as the UK attempts to make the savings required to fund membership of ESO. The future of both UKIRT and JCMT lies in wide-field surveys and their follow-up, and these formed the possible operational models presented by JAC to an international review in October 2001. The panel recommended a wide-field mode which protects science output but results in savings to the programme. This will inevitably lead to changes in the look and feel of the JAC, including a notable reduction in user support and the fact that major engineering projects will no longer be able to be carried out simultaneously at both telescopes. However, we are hopeful that the risk to science output will be small. A more detailed description of the review process and its outcome can be found in the Director's report in the current JCMT Newsletter.

In this issue I must also report a regrettable delay to the UIST project. By the time of the PATT meeting in December, it was clear that the read noise was sufficient to compromise the effectiveness of the instrument in most modes. As a result of the tightly-constrained JAC engineering schedule through the summer of 2002, delivery has been postponed into the beginning of semester 02B. As reported in this issue, we now anticipate UIST shared-risks observing by the last two months of Semester 02B.

We are now very close to releasing the first products of the Observation Management Project. This joint UKIRT/JCMT project provides, in conjunction with ORAC, software tools to handle the entire flexible-scheduling preparation / observation / data reduction / feedback loop. The software and the impetus behind it are described more fully elsewhere in the newsletter. The system will be tested this semester, and the results will inform recommendations to the UKIRT board as to the timing of full-time release for observers.

The WFCAM project continues to make good progress following a successful Preliminary Design Review in December. The UKIDSS consortium continues to prepare for WFCAM's arrival, following the appointment of Steve Warren as UKIDSS Survey Scientist and the Board's approval of the basic surveys and a rolling review process. At the JAC, we are currently in the middle of an extended downtime during which tests are being carried out to verify the ability of the UKIRT top-end to handle the WFCAM secondary mirror, which is four times the weight of the standard UKIRT secondary. Hearing a 12-kg dummy secondary ringing its way through a Q=10 resonance on the piezo stage in the lab is a sobering experience. But if successful, these tests will indicate that a major cost saving can be made in the WFCAM project, which would otherwise have to provide its own hexapod/tip-tilt stage. Watch this space...

UNITED KINGDOM INFRARED TELESCOPE

Issue 10, Spring 2002