The Long-Term Vision
More Immediate Goals
The STAC continues to discuss and refine its
long-term vision for the Observatory. Key to
this vision is recognizing that Gemini must
serve a broad community with diverse scientific needs. To remain relevant and productive, Gemini must position itself to take
advantage of opportunities with new capabilities coming online (e.g. the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, James Web Space
Telescope, Atacama Large Millimeter Array,
etc.) and as new and exciting sub-fields of research come to prominence. Combined with
the current era of severely limited resources
for new instrumentation and upgrades, this
motivates the STAC to focus future development efforts on workhorse instrumentation
that has broad scientific appeal and enables
a wide range of science cases. In 2013, as the
STAC works to develop and refine its longterm vision for Gemini, I encourage you,
our users, to contact your STAC representative or myself with input on what you want
Gemini Observatory to be in the 2020 and
2025 timeframe.
More immediately, in order to remain vibrant and continue to deliver new capabilities, progress on the Gemini High-resolution
Optical Spectrograph (GHOS) carries on, and
the STAC has discussed possible models for
deciding on and procuring the next instrument after GHOS. We feel it is extremely important to have significant involvement in
choosing the next instrument by the community and instrument building groups.
December2012
In consultation with Gemini development
staff, and to fit with the STAC’s developing vision for a Long-Range Plan, the STAC created
resolution 3.12, which lays out a set of general principles for selecting this Fourth Generation Instrument #3. The plan is