From the Director's Desk

Yet another hectic and eventful six months with some huge successes, strong support from the Board and agencies for the new instrument programme, mixed performance from the facility instruments, some sad losses of staff of the JCMT and a welcome for new staff members. Overall scientific output has been very good, although a lengthy spell of poor weather on Mauna Kea blighted the impact that even flexible scheduling can achieve.

Staff are the heart of most service organisations and the JCMT is no exception and so it was with regret that two of our long-standing Telescope System Support (TSS) staff (see People), Jim Pomeroy and Kimberly Pisciotta resigned in the autumn. We were grateful for both staff giving extensive notice of departure, thereby minimising delays through recruitment. Indeed, one new TSS, Scott Mikkelson, is already in post and recruitment is underway for a second TSS. In the meantime, as users are aware, we have been unable to offer 16-hour observing shifts at all times and some slots have been reduced to 12-hours. This situation was known to the JCMT Board and the ITAC and while regretted, cannot be helped. However, this is only a temporary measure, which will be rectified as soon as we are up to full strength. We also lost Rob Christensen, our senior heterodyne instrument support technician, who resigned in December to further his career with the Smithsonian Submillimetre Array (SMA). On the positive side, Brad Gom was recruited in September to provide instrumentation technical support for SCUBA along with Peter Oshiro, an electronic technician for JCMT instrumentation. Elese Archibald arrived to take up her PPARC-funded fellowship working with SCUBA, and will also undertake some SCUBA support plus a small amount of outreach. Robin Phillips, a new support astronomer, joined us in October. Robin will focus on heterodyne instrument support and software utilities and web pages. Nick Jessop, our second new support astronomer, will arrive at the end of March.

Last autumn was a key time in defining the future development programme of the JCMT and involved extensive consultation with the user community through announcements via email exploders and input through their representatives. The JCMT Board meeting in November produced an exciting outcome of strong support for the new programme. Users have been informed of the outcome already (see the Board Report) but the highlights are reproduced here for the general reader. The Board reinforced its enthusiasm for interferometric operation with the SMA and approved a draft MOU that is currently with the SMA for comment. Following the recommendations from the JCMT Advisory Panel, the Board approved the heterodyne camera, HARP-B, which is being constructed by MRAO, the UKATC and HIA (Victoria). There was also tremendous scientific enthusiasm for the new wide-field submillimetre camera, SCUBA-2 (link), and following its successful Conceptual Design Review (CoDR) in late October, was approved for its proof-of-concept construction phase. A proposal for a high frequency heterodyne camera was also received and the scientific potential was strongly appreciated. This project is a collaboration by SRON and MPIfR and is a D-band (600 GHz) version of the CHAMP camera. This is expected to return to the Board in May following a CoDR.

The JCMT Board made other pronouncements on policy issues regarding ‘key’ observing programmes; rules regarding release of data from the archive; and guaranteed time for instrument builders. These were also guided by input from the user community and the full text of the announcements was given in a note to users in January. While mentioning the JCMT archive, excellent progress has been made and the first tranche of SCUBA data has now been released to the CADC. The article by Remo Tilanus in this Newsletter illustrates the strong interest in the existing heterodyne-only data in the archive and the extent to which it has been polled and files extracted.

At the JAC, the surface project continues to make good progress, however, the commissioning of the new holography receiver was delayed, principally through unavailability of software provided by ourselves. In fact progress on software in a number of projects became critical in the autumn and a full review of the JCMT software requirements and capabilities was undertaken by the Head of JAC Software and Computer Services, Nick Rees. Some of the recommendations have already been enacted but there have been inevitable delays to some projects. Returning to the surface project, this should be electrically and mechanically complete in the early summer and testing in the fully active mode will then commence. The new spectrometer for the array receivers, ACSIS, is making excellent progress towards its CDR this summer.

Over the past few months, responsibilities amongst the support scientists have been rearranged following the appointment of Wayne Holland to replace Richard Prestage as Telescope Manager. Remo Tilanus is now line manager for the TSSs. Gerald Moriarty-Schieven takes charge of editing the Newsletter and I take this opportunity to thank Graeme Watt for his excellent work as editor since its inception. As part of this overall rearrangement I am very keen that we produce more and better utilities for the users and make better progress on the observers ‘wish lists’. A recent example of this is the heterodyne integration time calculator (link) produced by Robin Phillips. One of Wayne Holland’s key tasks will be to address the scientific quality issues regarding the operation of the facility and to oversee the subsequent improvements.

The telescope itself has just opened following a planned close-down for over a week to undertake the replacement of the carousel motor drives. The ETS group worked their usual miracles and the project has gone extremely successfully, being completed two days ahead of schedule. The final system tests have just been completed and the new carousel drive system has been declared operational. Hopefully, this is the last of the major systems on the JCMT that will require replacement and the Chief Engineer is preparing a roster of preventative maintenance for the facility to reduce downtime in the future through breakages.

Finally, in terms of instrumentation, while SCUBA and its polarimeter has performed excellently, albeit in the fixed 850/450 micron mode, the status of the heterodyne suite of instruments has recently fallen below that acceptable for a facility of the class of the JCMT. Bad luck has dogged the team attempting almost heroic attempts to repair the 230 GHz receiver, RxA3, and this is now out of service while its dewar is repaired by the cryostat manufacturers. The key facility instrument, the 345 GHz receiver RxB3, has suffered a number of problems and their resolution has sapped a huge amount of effort from staff both at the JAC and HIA. However, the recent downtime for repair should now leave this highly competitive receiver operating well and hopefully reliably. The 450/600 GHz receiver (RxW) has just had the high frequency mixers replaced by SRON and now has a very competitive performance at this band. This is excellent news for users and RxW now provides a very potent high frequency capability, which, with flexible scheduling, should allow high quality and competitive science to be undertaken.

Overall, the JCMT operations continue to be extremely tightly funded and I welcome the opportunity to present a series of scenarios of funding requirements to the Board in May. I also welcome the increase in budget by three partner agencies for this current year, and for FY2000/01. Following the May Board meeting, the future development and operation of the JCMT for the next five years should be determined, and I am confident that this will bring a very positive and exciting future indeed.

Ian Robson
16^th March 2000