THE UNITED KINGDOM INFRARED TELESCOPE
ANNUAL REPORT
2001-2002

1. The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope

Situated at an altitude of 4194m above sea level on the southern summit ridge of Mauna Kea, the 3.8-metre UK Infrared Telescope has for more than 20 years been the world's largest dedicated infrared telescope. UKIRT is owned and operated by the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), through the Joint Astronomy Centre (JAC), Hilo, under the oversight of the UKIRT Board. Time on UKIRT is awarded in peer-reviewed open competition to the world community by PPARC's Panel for Allocation of Telescope Time, apart from a 15% allocation to the University of Hawaii and, starting in 02B, up to 10 nights per semester to the Japanese astronomical community in exchange for Japan's contribution to the WFCAM project (described below).

UKIRT's purpose is to support high-quality fundamental observational research in infrared astronomy. It does this by providing to its user community astronomical instrumentation maintained at the state-of-the-art through a vigorous programme of instrument development in the UK, by continually improving the performance and observational efficiency of its existing instruments and the telescope, by providing its users with a world-leading user software environment coupled with comprehensive support of the highest quality, and by identifying opportunities to upgrade all of these systems.

This annual report covers two years, each of which saw an instrument project come to fruition. In 2001, MICHELLE (the thermal-infrared imager and spectrometer) was delivered, and in 2002 UIST (a 1-5µm imager, spectrometer and integral-field spectrometer) arrived at UKIRT. These two instruments mark the culmination of two thirds of the UKIRT forward instrumentation programme, and provide the astronomical community with access to world-class imaging, spectroscopy and polarimetry across the whole of the ground-based infrared spectrum.

The remaining instrument programme, WFCAM (the Wide Field Camera) will give UKIRT access to one-degree wide-field imaging with half arcsecond resolution and extremely high sensitivity. This project (at the UKATC) made good progress through the two years of this report and by the end of 2002 was expected to deliver in late 2003.

Also through the period covered by this report, we developed the software required to switch to a radically different scheduling method (flexible scheduling) designed to best match observing programmes to their conditions requirements and to maximise the completion rate of the most highly-rated programmes.

The equivalent number of staff working at UKIRT in 2002 remained similar to previous years, at approximately 30.