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The HST Second Decade Committee met for the second time in Garching, Germany, on November 17 & 18, 1998. The proceedings of the second meeting will be posted here in a few weeks. The proceedings will include the agenda, narrative descriptions of the discussions, and hyperlinks to working papers, such as pre-second-meeting inputs (distributed in omnibus mailings) and viewgraphs shown at the meeting.
Currently, the two main products of the Garching meeting are shown below: (1) an interim statement on large programs and (2) a recommendation on the near-infrared channel addition to WFC3.We solicit community input, especially on the issues attending the large-program recommendation.
Please send all comments to rbrown@stsci.edu or use the Contact Group email address page. |
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Interim Statement on Large Programs
The second decade of HST will provide an opportunity to stimulate fundamentally new ways of using this unique facility for projects with lasting scientific impact. The Second Decade Committee believes that significantly increasing the number of large programs--defined here as more than 100 orbits per program--would help achieve this goal. The Committee recommends that the fraction of HST time devoted to large programs be increased to 20-30% of total observing time during the second decade of operations. Such a large allotment of time would encourage many more large programs, and enable a qualitatively new class of program requiring 1000 orbits or more.
The value of large programs has been demonstrated, for example, by the three original Key Projects (Quasar Absorption Line Survey, HST Medium-Deep Survey, and Determination of Extragalactic Distance Scale), the Supernova Intensive Search, and the first Hubble Deep Field. Together, these five programs used only 4% of the HST observing time in the first eight years of HST, yet they were the major contributors to three out of the top six and five out of the top twenty most cited and most noteworthy areas of HST science.
Because they can produce large, coherent data sets for archival research in addition to immediate scientific results, large programs could provide an exciting legacy for HST and a foundation for future space missions and ground-based research programs for decades to come.
The Committee recommends that the selection of large HST programs should be through a peer-review process separate from the normal TAC process.
The Committee will continue to discuss and solicit community input on the variety of other issues related to implementing significantly more large programs on HST. These issues include…
1) What activities would facilitate new approaches to large programs and create opportunities for broad community participation and synergy with ground- and space-based observatories, e.g., workshops, sessions at larger conferences, and web sites?
2) Should there be a group constituted to aid or advise the STScI director on the development and implementation of large programs? (For example, this group might organize the above workshops, etc.)
3) Given that resources will be much more limited in the next decade, what steps can be taken to assure the scientific value of large programs, while at the same time ensuring that the overall program is cost-effective and consistent with plans for low-cost operations?
4) How should STScI be involved in the definition and/or implementation of large programs? (Possible benefits of STScI involvement include optimized data quality, calibration, and archiving functions, cost control, and use of a mature infrastructure already in place to feed back the experience for the benefit of the entire community.)
5) How and when should the observations be released? In what form and at what level of calibration? Will the data be proprietary for a period or not?
6) What should be the responsibility of large-program teams in creating data sets for the archive and in facilitating data utilization?
7) Given that much of the value is envisioned to be in follow-on research, how much GO and AR funding should be available for large programs? How should this funding be allocated?
Resolution Concerning the Near-Infrared Channel Addition to WFC3
At its second meeting, the HST Second Decade Committee has given further consideration to the scientific case and proposed characteristics of the near-infrared channel on WFC3 developed by the WFC3 team and the WFC3 SOC. It is greatly encouraged by the resolutions endorsing the concept of this new channel as passed by the SOC, STIC, and STUC. The HST Second Decade Committee unanimously concludes that the addition of a near-infrared channel appears to be technically feasible, can be expected to have high scientific return, and will help maximize HST's scientific productivity and competitiveness until 2010, which is the central goal of the HST Program.
The addition of a near-infrared channel to WFC3 will assure HST second-decade access to wavelengths longer than 1 micron. Observations at these wavelengths are of increasing importance to a number of fundamental research areas, including the formation and evolution of galaxies at high redshift, star formation, and the environs of stellar and protoplanetary systems. Furthermore, due to WFC3's improved infrared-detector quantum efficiency and wider field of view, its discovery efficiency will increase more than tenfold over that of NICMOS. With this expansion of discovery space, HST will provide a unique capability that is complementary to ground-based observations, both with and without adaptive optics. This powerful near-infrared imaging capability will also provide a strong scientific link between HST and its successor, NGST.
Given the short period of time remaining for the design and construction of WFC3, the Committee believes it is crucial that the WFC3 project move quickly to resolve outstanding technical issues concerning the near-infrared channel, such as the required detector properties and the thermo-electric cooler. The Committee also underscores the conclusion of the recent STIC resolution, which recommends that STScI and NASA pursue imaginative ways to minimize the cost of adding the near-infrared channel to WFC3, and that they identify funding sources, including possible ones within the Hubble Project and the HST user community.
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