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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, March 20, 2000
In 1992 the National Science Foundation entered into what is now a seven-nation partnership to construct and operate the Gemini twin 8-meter telescopes, one on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the other on Cerro Pachon in Chile. The Gemini Project team is in the final stages of constructing these two facilities; the Gemini North telescope has already produced diffraction-limited near infrared images using a University of Hawaii adaptive optics system. Science operations are scheduled to begin in the north in July 2000 and one year later in Chile. Eight years after inception, the project remains on schedule and within budget.
This presentation will provide an overview of the project, from its genesis in the 1980s through the plans already in place for the second generation instrumentation. Careful specification of the science requirements and their flow-down through error budgets to engineering design solutions has been a key element in controlling cost while assuring adequate performance. The interplay of systems engineering and configuration control with the talents of creative engineers and the aspirations of an international scientific community will be examined, as it proved to be somewhat unfamiliar to the ground-based community. Nevertheless, it will have produced two superb telescopes. In this talk, some of the engineering detail and early images will be presented, along with a personal view of the implications, both technical and sociological, for the next generation of large ground-based instruments.
Gordon W. Van Citters graduated from Princeton University in 1969 with a degree in Astrophysics. He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the Univ. of Texas in 1976, where he remained as a Research Scientist until 1979. He has been with the Division of Astronomical Sciences of the NSF since 1979, serving as the Program Director for Advanced Technologies and Instrumentation where he manages the Grants program focused on the development of new instrumentation for astronomical telescopes. Since 1993 he has also been the Coordinator for Optical and Infrared Facilities involving the activities and funding for three national optical astronomy observatories. He is also the NSF Program Manager for the six nation ($176M) Gemini 8-Meter Telescopes project. During 1988 he was on professional development leave from NSF doing independent research on visible light CCDs and infrared array detectors at the Institute for Astronomy, Univ. of Hawaii. He is the author or co-author of over 50 papers in technical journals.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Hugh O'Donnell
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov