Souped-up telescope

In the competitive world of astronomy, big telescopes seem to grab most of the headlines – and a lot of the funding, too. But smaller instruments, like New Mexico State University’s 1-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory, do crucial work their bigger siblings can’t.

The National Science Foundation recognizes this and recently awarded a three-year, $500,000 grant to the university to refurbish and upgrade its 1-meter telescope. The souped-up result will have unmatched capabilities when it comes to high-speed photometry, said Tom Harrison, observatory research specialist with the NMSU Department of Astronomy, and it will be improved in other ways as well.

The grant is through the NSF’s Program for Research and Education with Small Telescopes (PREST), which is designed to fill a gap caused by the trend toward telescopes with mirrors larger than 8 meters.

“There has been a huge impetus to build big telescopes and that has meant most of the smaller telescopes have not been supported well,” Harrison said. “So NSF has come up with this money to refurbish our 1-meter telescope, and in return we will give away up to 20 percent of our time on the telescope so that other astronomers can use it.”

The NMSU telescope operates robotically, so observations by scientists and students at other institutions can be done remotely.

A major part of the upgrade is the addition of a high-speed photometer that can measure five or six colors of the spectrum simultaneously.

“As far as I know there will be no other instrument on the planet that will have the high-speed multi-color capability of our new instrument,” Harrison said.

In addition, a large new digital CCD camera that was built in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory has been integrated into the telescope to allow wider-field operation.

Harrison and NMSU colleague Jon Holtzman also plan to hook the 1-meter telescope up to a large spectrograph on the 3.5-meter Astrophysical Research Consortium telescope, located next to it at Apache Point, by way of optical fibers. That would mean greater productivity for both the 1-meter telescope and the million-dollar spectrograph, which is not always in use on the 3.5-meter telescope.

In addition to NMSU’s 1-meter telescope and the 3.5-meter ARC telescope, Apache Point Observatory is home to the 2.5-meter Sloan Digital Sky Survey instrument, which has charted huge portions of the universe. The NMSU Astronomy Department operates the observatory for the ARC, a collaboration of research institutions that includes NMSU, University of Washington, University of Chicago, the Institute of Advanced Study, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.