Minutes USSKA Consortium telecon 09-18-2003 (by Wouter Vlemmings and Jim Cordes) Present: Douglas Bock Bob Brown Bernie Burke Roger Cappallo Chris Carilli Jim Cordes German Cortes Larry D'Addario David DeBoer Rick Fisher Bryan Gaensler Paul Goldsmith Dayton Jones Phil Kronberg Joe Lazio Frazer Owen Bob Preston Jill Tarter Yervant Terzian Wouter Vlemmings Craig Walker Sandy Weinreb Jack Welch Initial Comments: Yervant: Technical Development proposal Dec 1st, 5 years, $15M ballpark total, prototype construction, ~$K200/yr to SKA international office contribution, Monday (22 Sept) meeting with NSF, discuss international timeline, technology development plan, and its centralized management through NAIC Jim Cordes: The 5 Sep document gave an end-to-end breakdown of elements of the SKA. This list was not intended to be the list of work areas with uniform weighting. Our job is to prioritize and decide on appropriate funding levels for the most important work areas. Bob Preston: The proposal should discuss the TDP in the context of the international project and its time line of milestones. -downselection March 2005 -concept choice March 2007 (timeline available in sept 5 document) Larry D'Daddario, Phil Kronberg and others: Keep in mind US design might not be selected. US consortium will not object if chosen design does better science. Investigate hybrid schemes, but focus on our main concept: LNSD. But... plan for success. The LNSD concept has the best "science matrix" entries of all concepts, at present. NSF and reviewers of our proposal will ask the same question: what do we do if the LNSD concept is not selected? One answer (Weinreb) is that all aspects of our concept except antennas are in common with an overall SKA plan, no matter the concept chosen. But we don't want to pitch compatibility with all other concepts as the main factor determining what we request funds for (Tarter). Antennas are at the top of what we need work on. Sandy: The Level 00 technology issue is: Whether to include or exclude the extended array portion of the SKA when we decide upon work to be done in the TDP. Two aspects of this issue: 1. Data tranmission = a business problem, largely, but with some technical problems as well (Larry) 2. Low cost antennas would have to be field assembled because monolithic 12m hydroformed dishes are too big to transport over large distances. Make use of other US resources relevant to the SKA (e.g. ATA, EVLA, LOFAR) Priority list in the document "tdp.activities.weights.v1.txt": -wording/combination of item 6-7 (and 10). Split in subsections ? -- post-processing, archiving, algorithm development -question: what portion of the outreach is data management? -Simulation falls in item 1 (science): simulation of dynamic range etc. Science studies feed into simulation input for subsystems and the overall SKA simulator. -This proposal will stick to technology and development with input from science work funded elsewhere. NSF needs to know what the big science questions are Level 0 science drivers: priority list will emerge from Leiden November 2003 Joe Lazio: the "final" Level 0 science goals won't emerge until next year, but we can glean from discussion in Leiden some important science drivers than influence our design. Cordes: suggest leave out EoR as a target for the LNSD concept; instead anticipate hybrid SKA component that targets EoR or a follow-on to LOFAr targets the EoR. Prototype: components or array -antenna at VLA site ? -other site, test cutting/shipping -6m mold 0.75 M$ -F/D = 0.6 Cordes: Very rough allocation: 15 FTE/yr + ATA Testbed + International Participation Costs + hardware/prototype costs -write down FTE plan separate from priority list Discuss Center of Excellence idea (Jill) with NSF Action items: 1. think about work areas you can contribute to. 2. NSF visit (JMC, YT, RB) 3. prioritize work areas (JMC) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Agenda for telecon: 1. Brief introduction, with reference to the TDP document sent out on 5 Sept. (Revised version attached and available at www.astro.cornell.edu/~cordes/SKA). 2. Prioritize work areas with respect to the main goal of developing a well-costed, affordable, feasible design concept. [If this entails de-scoping as per recent discussions by email or some kind of hybrid, or other, so be it. I would expect descoping to be something that we conclude from our TDP after several years, not something we propose in December.] 3. Discuss deliverables. 4. Rough estimates of costs for the work areas we propose. 5. Identify individuals for contributing text and graphics for the proposal. 6. Action items. 7. Next telecon: 25 Sept. will include report on upcoming visit to NSF by three of us (22 Sept.) and will continue with the proposal development. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Some comments: A. In the 5 Sept document ("Outline and Work Areas ...") there was a list for work areas that was mis-interpreted by some as being of equal weight in terms of importance/effort needed/funding needed. Not so! The list was intended to be a fairly complete itemization of what our OVERALL concept is about and not the list of things we would request funding for. The number of funded items might be small or at least dominated by a small number of key items. B. Some were nervous about the "The NSF has requested ..." sentence in the Summary. I've changed this in the updated version to a much wordier, bureaucratically correct statement. C. The email flurry re data rates and array sizes implies we have work to do to sell the SKA to ourselves as well as to a review panel for the TDP and other panels in the future. My opinion is that while there are areas of difficulty in implementing the LNSD concept, we can certainly build an LNSD-based SKA (or 0.5*SKA) that does a lot of good science. It's our job to be sure we have the specifications, the science goals, and projected feasibility of the needed technology all in sync. D. To sell the project we really do need the Level-0 science goals that will begin to emerge at the Leiden meeting in November. They will evolve of course. But our colleagues at the NSF need to sell the project at relevant venues if they decide to fund our proposal after a panel review. A short list of prime science goals, along with the expectation that discoveries and new science areas will come out over the next 10-20 years, is needed if we are to compete with the optical community and their large telescope.