School Manager's Report

Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue2 1–31 March 2020

The month of February has been a busy month for RSAA administration team. Due to staff turnover and leave, services you receive might have been delayed. I would like to thank everyone for their patience while we work through the backlog of requests.

We continue to collaborate with Facilities & Services (F&S) on our bid to refresh all external signs including the signage at the bottom of the hill.  F&S is rolling out a new signage project for ANU and we are likely to be the first campus whose external signage will be refreshed (unless the planned roll-out changes due to ANU executive intervention).

The outreach team have been busy in February! They have organised International Women's Day 2020: Speed Meet a Scientist program. The outreach team will soon announce the 2020 Mount Stromlo Public Astronomy Nights. Dr Brad Tucker has convened a roundtable discussion on Tuesday 25th of February 2020 with ANU staff, tourism operators, Questacon, government officials to reignite the possibility to build a “'National Air and Space Museum” ( proposed name T.B.D) at Mount Stromlo. Collaboration with Challenger Center/ Smithsonian was also discussed. Possibilities and challenges were tabled in this roundtable discussion. Watch this space!

Last year, F&S informed us that they would not facilitate the public tours at Siding Spring Observatory campus. To fill the void, RSAA have contracted Dark Sky Traveller to run the tours on our behalf from December 2019. Reports of the tours run by Dark Sky Traveller have been extremely positive and we plan on expanding our relationship with them in the coming months e.g. school visits and educational tour packages.

Lastly, COVID-19 shows no sign of slowing down. The Australian government have advised not to travel to China and Iran and to exercise high degree of caution when you are travelling to South Korea, Japan, Italy and Mongolia. Please keep informed about the advices being provided by the government and ANU. There could be a significant financial impact on RSAA because of the virus but the full impact we will not be able to ascertain until June/July this year.