Quote:
Originally Posted by renormalised
Gary, that's probably the best bit of funding the government have given to a science project for quite some time. It's a pity that weren't done more often.
What I'd like to see is a resurrection of the Spacewatch program, on a full time basis with dedicated telescopes.
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Hi Carl,
Indeed it is a good chunk of change and I know it was very much welcomed
by the professional astronomy community.
From my understanding, what is also commendable about the current
Australian Government funding was that it was done in the middle of an economic
downturn at the same time when, apparently, many of the countries in Europe
were being forced to cut back on funding for astronomy.
However, continual funding, that is year in, year out, with a sense of certainty
is also very important.
Behind the scenes at places like the AAO, the Research School of Astronomy
at ANU and CSIRO Astrophysics are teams of talented engineers, machinists, IT
staff, administrators and support personnel, technicians, operators, etc, etc.
who form the nine-tenths of the iceberg beneath the surface of organizations
such as these. For example, in Sydney and Canberra we are fortunate to have
some highly specialized instrumentation makers at these institutions. If funding
were to be ever skipped for a year, then these types of people are then forced
to move on and their very specialized talents, which are only acquired from
working on an evolution of instruments over many years, is lost. It then becomes
extremely difficult to reassemble a team that has had to be let go.
And instrumentation is a key part of large optical and radio telescopes. Without
state-of-the-art instrumentation, the probability of leading edge science coming
out of an observatory becomes much more difficult.
Some of the instrumentation developed in Australia is the "world's best"
and is used on some of the big scopes on Mauna Kea and in Chile.
For example, I was lucky to pay a visit to the AAO at Epping a few years
back and see the Echidna instrument being readied for the Subaru telescope
in Hawaii. What a fabulous piece of work it was. You can see some pictures here -
http://www.aao.gov.au/local/www/echidna/gallery.html
One of the next big opportunities will be the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) and
we have our fingers crossed that the international consortium will see the
advantages of making Australia its home, advantages that most Australians would
see as being self evident.
