Leveraging Other Resources

Project ASTEROID will make use of several Winer resources in addition to the contributions provided by independent donors or those identified by a major funding partner. We are willing to provide the primary mirror blank, a site at our observatory in southeastern Arizona, the project management oversight, and the staff to operate and maintain the telescope and to reduce our own data.

In 1995, Corning offered to sell Winer a 1.5-meter ULE mirror blank. Winer acquired the blank (shown in Figure 1), which had a fair market value at the time of $98,000 according to Corning officials. If we proceed with the 1.5-m option, we will offer this blank for use as the primary mirror in the telescope, the main light-collecting optical element. For the 2.5-m option, we will ask the telescope vendor to provide the blank.

Our mirror blank is the same type of ultra-low thermal expansion glass material used for the Gemini and Subaru 8-meter primary mirrors in the telescopes atop Mauna Kea, Hawai'i. These telescopes, designed and put into service in the late 1990's, are among the largest and most advanced in the world and are used for forefront astronomical research. The blank we will provide is a raw blank, in need of slumping under high heat to the general shape of the optical design, grinding and polishing to the precise figure that the optical designer prescribes, and coating with a very thin film of aluminum.

Fig. 1: 1.5-m Corning ULE Blank (a 1-foot ruler was placed on the blank for scale)

We offer an option of placing the 1.5-m telescope in our observatory at our site near Sonoita, Arizona. Our site is located at an elevation of approximately 5000 feet, about 17 miles due east of the MMT Observatory on Mt. Hopkins. We are located roughly 50 miles southeast of Tucson and 3 miles east of the town of Sonoita (pop. ~1500). We receive about 15-20 inches of rain each year, almost three-fourths of it during the summer monsoon season. Most years, we have approximately 200 clear nights, about one-third of which are photometric. At this location, we can step outside of our home after watching TV with normal room lighting, look up, and see the Milky Way horizon to horizon without dark adapting our eyes. The State of Arizona and Santa Cruz County have strict outdoor lighting codes, and our staff is on good terms with the local county Building Department inspector responsible for enforcement of the codes. The local community also supports dark skies.

On a visit in September 2007, Prof. Robert Mutel of the University of Iowa used a calibrated dark sky meter to measure a sky background at our Sonoita site of 21.4 V magnitudes per square arc second on a clear, moonless night with the meter pointed towards the zenith.

Located at this site is our observatory structure, consisting of a building (shown in Figure 2) approximately 105 feet long and 26 feet wide. Half of the building is our machine shop, where the control room that houses the telescope control computers and electronics is located. In this machine shop we have machine tools donated to us by Hughes Missile Systems (now Raytheon) in Tucson, including a gearhead engine metal-cutting lathe, a Bridgeport milling machine, a granite surface plate, and a 25-ton hydraulic press. Other donations of note include a Lincoln Electric plasma cutter and a Miller MIG welder. We also have a 5 H.P. Ingersoll-Rand air compressor. The other half of the building is the observatory, covered by a roof that rolls on crane rail over the machine shop portion of the building. In the photo below, the roof is open, shown rolled back to the north over the machine shop.

The floor of the observatory contains three mounting places, or pads, for small amateur-sized telescopes, five pads for larger telescopes up to one meter in aperture, and one for the 1.5-meter telescope. We currently house three 0.5-m (20-inch) telescopes owned by Washington University at St. Louis (Missouri), Winer, and our Tucson collaborator, a 14.5-inch telescope owned by the University of Iowa, and an all-sky survey camera owned by The Ohio State University used by a graduate student for his doctoral thesis project. These groups pay us a fee each year to rent their respective pads, and for maintenance and repair services. These fees will provide the funds needed to operate the 1.5-m telescope.

Thus the infrastructure is already in place to house the 1.5-m telescope and to maintain, repair, and operate it. At this time, we see no need to build a new building to house the new telescope, or to hire and train new staff to operate, maintain, and repair it. This will save considerable time and expense in the project schedule and make efficient use of existing Winer Observatory facilities and staff. As a contingency, depending on the type and dimensions of the final telescope delivered, the project budget includes funds for infrastructure upgrade, in case the new telescope does not quite fit under the existing roof. For more information about the Winer Observatory Sonoita Field Station, please see our Web site at URL www.winer.org.

Fig. 2: Winer Observatory Sonoita Field Station

If our partner or other donor prefers to place the 1.5-m telescope at a better site, or to fund the 2.5-m option, we would move our operation from its present location to one with darker skies and better seeing, most likely at a higher altitude with a lower airmass at the zenith. We have been monitoring weather patterns in North America for several years, and note that eastern Arizona and western New Mexico have good weather, as well as west Texas and Baja California. We will use a DIMM and other appropriate seeing evaluation equipment before making a final decision on a new site.

The final element that we bring to the project is staff. This includes project management for definition, design, construction, and commissioning of the telescope and its instrument, scientific oversight of the telescope construction project and of its operation after commissioning, and personnel to select targets, program the telescope, and reduce and analyze the data. Our Scientific Director, Mark Trueblood, was employed by Ford Aerospace in the 1980's as a program manager, responsible to the Division Vice President for performance on the contracts to build the satellite ground control systems for the Hubble Space Telescope and the GOES NEXT weather satellites. In 1990, he left Ford Aerospace (the Ford Motor Company sold its aerospace division later that year to Loral, and it is now part of Lockheed-Martin) to join the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. His first position at NOAO was as a systems engineer and a programmer for the multi-terabyte GONG solar physics database; currently he oversees instrument development for the Gemini 8-m telescopes in the US as a member of the NOAO Gemini Science Center.

Mr. Trueblood holds both a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Brown University and a Master of Science degree in Astronomy from the University of Maryland. His MS thesis submitted in early 1983 was on telescope control using microcomputers. This thesis topic evolved into two books on the subject of telescope control. Mr. Trueblood has authored several papers on the topic of telescope control and high speed photometry, and now observes minor planets to obtain astrometry for the Minor Planet Center. He is a member of the American Astronomical Society and of its Division for Planetary Sciences.

For the Design and Construction Phases of the telescope project, Mr. Trueblood will serve as the Project Manager, assembling a team of experienced optical and opto-mechanical engineers to work on the design and development of the telescope. During the Commissioning and Operations Phases, he will lead the operation of the telescope and the data reduction and analysis effort. During these last two phases, he will serve as the Principal Investigator for the project.