The Canadian effort to build a very large optical telescope is rapidly ramping up in activity and moving toward a critical decision point for funding.
On June 11, 2003 ACURA signed an agreement with Caltech, the University of California, and AURA to join our efforts together under the name of TMT and set up an interim Board, Scientific Advisory Committee and Steering Group. The latter acts as a project manager. Within Canada ACURA and NRC-HIA have an interim collaborative agreement to co-ordinate the Canadian partnership within TMT. Expenditures since June 11 are recorded as potential partnership contributions in the telescope.
Activity within TMT grew rapidly over the summer. Caltech has received US$17.5M from the Moore Foundation and it is expected that UC will soon receive an equal amount. About 50-60 people are working nearly full time on the project, with about 20 in Canada, mostly on a part-time basis. The SAC has met nearly monthly to develop a draft science requirements document which quantifies in detail our expectations for telescope performance. This important SAC document will be the guiding requirements for the entire project. The ranked priority list was established in an important meeting in Vancouver in early September. As the project undertakes the detailed design it will be necessary for the SAC to make trade-off decisions based on cost and other information supplied by the project office. TMT advertized for a project manager in August. The search committee is lead by Ed Stone of JPL, with Art MacDonald and David Crampton as Canadian representatives. The process is expected to lead to an offer in the early new year.
TMT is conceived as a relatively general purpose telescope, with an emphasis on diffraction limited image quality. The SAC agreed that the three highest priorities for first light were a wide-field multi-object spectrograph in the optical, a multi-conjugate AO fed imaging spectrograph in the in infrared, and a diffraction limited mid-infrared spectrograph and imager. Within the first decade an extreme AO imaging system and a suite of high resolution spectrographs will also be built. The factors driving these choices include a range of science that cannot be attained on any existing or planned telescope and complementarity with the in progress JWST and ALMA projects as well as the science drivers for the SKA.
The current Canadian funding for TMT comes from about $4M in LRP funds to NRC-HIA and $0.4M in an NSERC-IOF grant to a consortium of University scientists. This money will soon expire. ACURA has put forward a proposal to CFI for $125M to allow us to undertake our share of the detailed design and to initiate construction. Our group met with the CFI Expert Panel in October. The Presidents of UBC and Toronto, Martha Piper and Bob Birgeneau lead to an exceptionally powerful presentation. The CFI ranking committee meets Jan 13-15, after which the recommendations go to the CFI Board. Announcement of results is planned for February or March.
Ray Carlberg