SMARTS 2 – Opportunity!
The SMARTS consortium has been operating the small telescopes at CTIO since February 2003, and is regarded by all as having been an unqualified success. As a consortium member, NOAO provides three of the four telescopes (the fourth is the Yale 1.0-m) and some of the instruments, in exchange for 25% of the telescope time for the general community. Other consortium members have provided instruments and operations funding, have provided day-day operations support, and scheduled the telescopes, under the leadership of the SMARTS Principal Scientist, Charles Bailyn of Yale University.
One of the reasons for the success of SMARTS has been that it has NOT been run as a cut-price operation! The telescope operators employed by SMARTS are considered to be full members of the CTIO TelOps group, the two observer support specialists Edgardo Cosgrove and Arturo Gomez are long-time CTIO employees with much experience with the small telescopes. The CTIO engineering staff is on-call to respond to instrument and telescope faults, and rapid response is also provided by Ohio State University and U. Montreal for their instruments - thus the downtime has remained at a very low level. The consortium resources have allowed new instrumentation to be installed, and a variety of observing modes are offered: queue scheduled service observing on the 1.3-m, mixed service-classical on the 0.9-m and 1.5-m, and classical on the 1.0-m. All this has allowed a great variety of programs to be efficiently carried out by consortium members and the NOAO community, from synoptic programs requiring a few minutes per night, to large many-night surveys.
"SMARTS 2" commenced in January 2006 following the end of the 3-year SMARTS agreement. There is still space for some more participants. We have made SMARTS 2 a bit more flexible – it will no longer be necessary to make a three-year commitment – institutions can join and drop out when their scientific/financial needs require, as long as they give adequate notice so another partner can be found.
What will it cost to become a member of the SMARTS 2 consortium? For a cash contributor the algorithm 1 night (service observing) = 1.5 nights (on-site observer) = $1400 should be used for planning purposes. Thus a $50K/year commitment will buy you a very significant amount of telescope time.
What telescope/combinations make up SMARTS 2? There is CCD imaging on the 0.9-m (SITe 2K CCD, 13.5 arcmin square field) and the 1.0-m (Fairchild 4K CCD, 20 arcmin field) and the simultaneous CCD-IR imager ANDICAM is on the 1.3-m. In 2007 the 1.5-m will have a combination of IR Imaging with CPAPIR (30 arcmin field) alternated with CCD spectroscopy using the RC spectrograph. For more details see http://www.ctio.noao.edu/telescopes/smarts.html.
Alistair Walker (awalker@ctio.noao.edu)
Charles Bailyn (bailyn@astro.yale.edu)