provements made to the “spur road”
(a short segment of the old Saddle
Road and a portion of a lava field)
via which we now have to access the
mountain, we returned to work on
the planned maintenance shutdown
(excluding coating of the primary
mirror which has been deferred un-
til next year). The maintenance was
completed on August 30th, allowing
a resumption of night-time observ-
ing and enabling the TEXES instru-
ment to visit as scheduled. Access to
the mountain remains intermittently
compromised by conditions on the
spur road in particular, but for now we are
proceeding with operations.
Gemini South Annual Shutdown
a Success
Figure 1.
Assistant Engineer
Mariah Birchard
(left) and Senior
Electronic
Technician
Alejandro Gutiérrez
(right), work on the
maintenance of
one of the modules
of the Acquisition
and Guiding Unit.
Credit: Manuel
Paredes
ensure that Gemini remains at the forefront
of ground-based optical/IR astronomy and
best serves the needs of our international
user community throughout the coming de-
cade. We encourage all of our users to have a
look and see where Gemini is headed!
A successful annual shutdown at Gemini
South ran from August 12th to August 27th.
Accomplishments during this shutdown in-
cluded replacement of the Cassegrain rota-
tor encoder, repairs to the helium lines, and
maintenance of the Acquisition and Guid-
ance Unit (Figure 1). In the spirit of sharing
resources ramping up to the National Sci-
ence Foundation’s Center for Optical-infrared
Astronomy (NCOA), we had some excellent
support from a few Cerro Tololo Inter-Amer-
ican Observatory technicians, doing cross-
training and knowledge sharing and tighten-
ing relationships.
Figure 2.
Cover of Gemini’s
Strategic Scientific Plan,
approved by the Gemini
Board of Directors.
Strategic Scientific Plan
The Strategic Scientific Plan (SSP; Figure 2),
approved by the Gemini Board of Directors
during their most recent meeting, outlines
the scientific direction and activities of the
Gemini Observatory in the 2020s. It also pro-
vides a timeline for the Observatory’s major
instrumentation and operations develop-
ment efforts. The motivation for the SSP is to
January 2020 / 2019 Year in Review
GeminiFocus
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