From the Director's Desk

The last six months were overshadowed by the tragic death of Fred Baas. Fred was one of the kindest and nicest people that anyone could meet and he was very well liked. His sudden and untimely death left the JAC with a deep sadness. Indeed, it is hard to believe that he’s gone from us.

Now turning to operations, unfortunately the optimism I expressed in the last Newsletter regarding the excellent weather was short lived. Since then the weather has been quite dreadful, with only the occasional brief spell of decent observing conditions. The major event of the period was the JCMT Board meeting in May, where the Board (and agencies) supported SCUBA-2 being funded by the JCMT Development Fund until November pending decisions from the UK Office of Science and Technology regarding funding (since approved). Wayne Holland provides an update on the exciting SCUBA-2 project later in this Newsletter. The Board will need to revisit the SCUBA-2 project in November.

The Board also agreed that to save on staff effort, an experiment would be undertaken whereby the Annual Report would be published only on the Web and would be a condensed version of the previous glossy publication. Much of the key user information (such as project status) will, in future, be confined to the Newsletter, which is much more timely. The Annual Report will primarily serve as an audit of the top-level activities of the JCMT. In this vein, it was also brilliant to find that in the calendar year 2000, the JCMT refereed publications reached 100, dominated by SCUBA. Furthermore, in citations to high impact papers in 1999, SCUBA was second only to the HST, beating all other facilities and satellites. This is a brilliant achievement and SCUBA continues to provide truly exciting new scientific discoveries as shown by the breadth and depth of the science articles in this Newsletter.

JCMT operations continue to be very tightly pressed. However, the new Telescope Support Specialist rotation of 4+12 hours seems to be working well in achieving our 16-hour operation, albeit with the unavailability of extended hours after second shift in good conditions. HARP-B is making good progress, and although there have been problems with the supply of SIS devices, very recently this seems to have improved. Unfortunately, ACSIS has run into a number of problems following the CDR last December and progress on fabrication of the downconverter modules has proven to be a major stumbling block. While the Board approved the principle of the increased funding required to complete the spectrometer, a final report on the satisfactory route forward is still awaited before this can be released. It is clear that ACSIS is going to be delayed, but to what extent is not yet clear.

As a result of a PPARC request, a significant amount of management effort has gone into identifying possible operating models for the JAC post 2006, a time when the JCMT (and UKIRT) is expected to be operating primarily in a wide-field mapping mode. This will be debated during the autumn with decisions in principle expected by the end of the year.

I was particularly pleased when I heard that PPARC had awarded part-funding for an outreach specialist post at the JAC. From a very high quality field of applicants, Douglas Pierce-Price from MRAO was appointed. He will join us later in the autumn and as part of his work he will also be making a notable contribution to SCUBA image processing software that will be of major benefit to users, especially those for wide-field mapping projects.

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