Project Budget and Schedule

Project ASTEROID has been structured to ensure completion at the earliest possible date using a conservative engineering and contracting approach.

Early in the Construction Phase, the Project will require the selected telescope and imager vendors to present a Design Review showing how the telescope conforms to the Functional and Performance Requirements Document and the Operations Concept Definition Document. They will also present detailed management plans showing budgets and schedules for completion of the project.

The major budget items are given below for three funding options whose performance we have studied. Option 1 is a 1.5-m telescope located at the current Winer Observatory Sonoita Field Station. Option 2 is a 1.5-m telescope located at a new site with better seeing, darker skies, and higher elevation. Option 3, the baseline to which we are working, is a 2.5-m telescope also located at a new, better site.

The project schedule is as follows:

Schedule Item	Year	Option 1	Option 2	Option 3
		(1.5-m Sonoita)	(1.5-m Mtn)	(2.5-m Mtn)
Fundraising	0	n/a	n/a	n/a
Design Phase	1	$ 500,000	$ 700,000	$ 700,000
Construction Phase - Year 1	2	1,000,000	1,500,000	2,500,000
Construction Phase - Year 2	3	1,500,000	1,500,000	3,000,000
Construction Phase - Year 3	4	1,500,000	2,500,000	3,300,000
Construction Phase - Year 4	5	1,000,000	1,800,000	3,500,000
Construction Phase - Year 5	6	250,000	1,000,000	1,500,000
Commissioning Phase	7	250,000	1,000,000	1,500,000
	Totals	$6,000,000	$10,000,000	$18,000,000

The budgets for the major subsystems are as follows:

Budget Item	Option 1	Option 2	Option 3
	(1.5-m Sonoita)	(1.5-m Mtn)	(2.5-m Mtn)
Telescope with control system	$3,000,000	$ 3,000,000	$ 6,000,000
Imager, readout electronics, filter wheel, and control system	2,500,000	2,500,000	5,500,000
Study Phase, site modifications and infrastructure enhancements	500,000	4,500,000	6,500,000
Total	$6,000,000	$10,000,000	$18,000,000

The third budget item includes the funds needed for the optical designer, systems engineering that cannot be performed by the Project Scientist, and other contract staff not provided by either Winer staff or by the telescope or imager vendors. The prices are based on:

Telescope:

1. Discussions with DFM Engineering, Astronomical Consultants & Equipment, and EOS Technologies, all vendors of telescopes of these sizes.
2. The price quoted by DFM Engineering for the 1.3-m f/4 1.7-degree USNO telescope.

Imager:

1. Discussions with NOAO CCD experts on the cost of detectors and of mounting them into Dewars.
2. Preliminary discussions with Spectral Instruments on the prices for an imager; this appears to be an area of considerable price risk, depending on how large an area is covered by the optical design and whether we include detectors for wavefront sensing for guiding and focus.
3. Comparison with other one-degree imagers. For example, the One-Degree Imager (ODI) for the WIYN 3.5-m telescope on Kitt Peak was initially estimated to cost approximately $6.5 million. This project is now in the construction phase. The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) being built by the Department of Energy for the CTIO 4-meter Blanco telescope is estimated to cost approximately $20 million (including DOE overhead and G&A). We have made some cost-saving assumptions, such as sacrificing the ultraviolet and using a conceptual design spanning 360 to 1000 nm instead of spanning the entire Sloan spectrum of 280 to 1123 nm. This permits us to use less expensive glass and an all-spherical design. Furthermore, most large-format imagers use an array of many (e.g., 60 or more) 2k x 4k CCDs (each of which costs $80,000). Instead, we assumed in our budget that for the 1.5-m telescope, we would use a single 10600 x 10600 pixel monolithic detector that costs approximately $150,000 to cover the greater part of one degree. For the 2.5-m telescope, we assumed we would use a mosaic of these. These assumptions greatly reduced the estimated cost of the imager in the budget projections.

Design Study and Infrastructure:

1. Estimate of $75,000 for optical design, $50,000 for systems engineering, and other engineering study costs for a total Design Study phase cost of $300,000
2. Infrastructure upgrade costs for the 1.5-m telescope located at the Winer Observatory Sonoita Field Station include allowances for replacing the current rail/wheel system with I-beams and castors with custom trucks, raising the roll-off roof by an appropriate amount to clear the new telescope, and extending the I-beams to permit the roof to roll far enough north for all telescopes under the roof to see Polaris. The last item would permit the installation of a Differential Image Motion Monitor (DIMM) to obtain continuous seeing measurements in a form recognized by most astronomers as an accurate representation of the local seeing. The infrastructure upgrades also include a higher bandwidth Internet system to send the images from the observatory to the data reduction specialist's office in Tucson for analysis.
3. Infrastructure upgrade costs for Options 2 and 3 assume moving to a higher elevation site with better seeing, and building a new enclosure and site infrastructure, including a road, Internet, self-sustaining electrical power generation, and other items needed in a very remote area. If we locate at an existing site, funds not spent on infrastructure directly will be spent on "buy-in" fees and other infrastructure charges assessed by the site owner, so the budget is the same either way.