Director's Message
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue22 1–30 November 2021
There were two significant bits of news in the first week of November, one internal to ANU and the other very public indeed!
The internal news was the preliminary numbers for the College of Science budget, which are simple to report, since basically they are the same as last year plus 1% indexation: RSAA will have a recurrent budget in 2022 of $6.5M. The indexation, it should be noted, will not fully cover the increase in salary costs, since we had a 2% salary increase in July 2021 and another 2% increase is slated for July 2022. This historically-based budget also means we don’t see any reflection of increased earnings from teaching revenue and grant income flowing through to the School in 2022; these returns are still based on earnings back in 2018 and 2019, which for RSAA were lower than they are now. We are, however, promised a revised ANU budget model for 2023 that may take notice of such earnings. On a positive note, after all the changes in the last couple of years some stability in the School's recurrent budget is welcome, and we are confident based on this year’s outcomes that RSAA can be run effectively with this level of recurrent budget.
The very public (and very good) news was the release of the Astro2020 US Decadal Survey report, which ranked the US Extremely Large Telescope Program (US-ELTP) as the top frontier (i.e. very large) project for ground-based observatories. Note that the US-ELTP comprises GMT, TMT, and NOIRLab support for the two telescopes. Astro2020 recommended US federal support (i.e. NSF funding) for the final construction stages of the Giant Magellan Telescope, but also set some conditions for such funding: (i) a secure site; (ii) an acceptable management plan for the operation of the observatory; (iii) the public share of US observing time is roughly equivalent to the share of funds provided by the NSF; (iv) all data is available for public access after a proprietary period for the observers; and (v) a viable financial plan, including binding commitments from all parties, demonstrating that finances are complete with NSF funding. These are all reasonable requirements, and the first four are straightforward; the challenge for GMT will be ensuring that the partnership has sufficient funds from current and existing partners that the NSF contribution (at a level still t.b.d.) will complete the funding required to build the telescope. Here in Australia, ANU and AAL will need to decide whether they wish to contribute additional funding in order to maintain their share of the telescope and, if so, seek those resources. For now, however, we can celebrate this major milestone on the journey towards construction of one of the premier astronomical facilities of the next decade! It is also worth checking out the new version of the Giant Magellan Telescope webpages, which (though still a work in progress) have some beautiful new realisations of what the GMT will look like and contain a wealth of information about the telescope and the science it will do.
Matthew Colless
