Henry Roe
A Vision for Gemini’s Future
Gemini’s Science and Technology Advisory Committee (STAC) held its semester
2012B meeting in Hilo, Hawai‘i, to discuss and recommend near- and mid-term
priorities for the Observatory, as well as to continue the discussion of its longterm vision. The meeting covered a wide range of topics from instrumentation to
operations. This article highlights a few of the committee’s recommendations.
The Science and Technology Advisory Committee (STAC) held its 2012B meeting at the Hilo
Base Facility on October 29-30. The STAC’s report, which was delivered to the Board at its
November 2012 meeting, will be publicly available at: http://www.gemini.edu/node/11903.
The STAC’s charge is to focus on both near- and mid-term priorities for the Observatory, as
well as the long-term vision that drives all other decisions.
The new year promises to be an exciting and challenging one for the Observatory, particularly in the South — with FLAMINGOS-2, the Gemini Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics
System (GeMS), and the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) all expected to make major progress
toward commissioning and regular science use.
Almost certainly, the STAC will have to make some difficult decisions regarding resource
tradeoffs among those three instruments and other high priority projects, such as upgrading detectors on Gemini South’s Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS-S). In its 2012B report
the STAC has already made recommendations for handling some of the likely resource conflicts and will be closely engaged with the Observatory as the year proceeds.
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