NSF Town Hall: AAS 236 Ralph Gaume, Jim Neff, B. Ashley Zauderer - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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NSF Town Hall: AAS 236 Ralph Gaume, Jim Neff, B. Ashley Zauderer - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Dec 04, 2023 139 likes •386 views

NSF Town Hall: AAS 236 Ralph Gaume, Jim Neff, B. Ashley Zauderer NSF Division of Astronomical Sciences June 2, 2020 Agenda COVID-19 Impacts AST Personnel NSF Personnel Science Highlights from AST Facilities Budget Status

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SLIDE 1

NSF Town Hall: AAS 236

Ralph Gaume, Jim Neff,

  • B. Ashley Zauderer

NSF Division of Astronomical Sciences

June 2, 2020

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SLIDE 2

Agenda

  • COVID-19 Impacts
  • AST Personnel
  • NSF Personnel
  • Science Highlights from AST Facilities
  • Budget Status
  • AST Grants Program (Jim Neff)
  • Radio/Optical Spectrum Management (B. Ashley Zauderer)
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SLIDE 3

COVID-19 Impacts

  • AST facilities
  • Observing: NRAO (VLA, VLBA), GBO, Arecibo, GONG, Gemini (N).
  • Idle: Gemini (S), CTIO, Rubin Obs., ALMA, KPNO, DKIST.
  • Significant restart risks/costs, replan of MREFC programs
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SLIDE 4
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COVID-19 Impacts

  • AST facilities
  • Observing: NRAO (VLA, VLBA), GBO, Arecibo, GONG, Gemini (N).
  • Idle: Gemini (S), CTIO, Rubin Obs., ALMA, KPNO, DKIST,
  • Significant restart risks/costs, replan of MREFC programs
  • NSF: NSF Implementation of OMB Memo M-20-17.
  • Includes (but not limited to):
  • Allowability of salaries and other project activities.

Recipients are authorized to continue to charge salaries, stipends, and benefits to currently active NSF awards consistent with the recipients’ policy of paying salaries (under unexpected or extraordinary circumstances) from all funding sources, Federal and non-Federal.

  • Decadal Survey:
  • Delays in release of the decadal survey may impact start of MREFC

funding for large ground-based programs.

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SLIDE 6

COVID-19 Impacts: NSF Staff

  • March 16: NSF implemented up to 100 % telework

policy.

  • NSF building essentially closed to staff.
  • Flexible work schedules for staff, flexible dependent care.
  • Return to work? NSF never stopped working.
  • Work-related travel cancelled.
  • All NSF meetings/panels 100% video conference.
  • AST was in middle of panel season.
  • AST has successfully run all panels after mid-March

remotely, 2 POs per panel plus Admin support, AST continued as scheduled.

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SLIDE 7

Personnel

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SLIDE 8

Division of Astronomical Sciences (AST)

Management Team Facilities, Mid-Scale, & MREFC Projects Administration ESM

National Radio Astronomy Obs.; ALMA Large Synoptic Survey Telescope AAG; CDS&E; cross- NSF programs Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (EXC) AstroLab Ops. MSO,
  • CSDC. Gemini
Observatory Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowships AstroLab Transition, National Solar Observatory; DKIST Stellar Astronomy & Astrophysics IIP Coordinator Advanced Technologies & Instrumentation; EXC; MRI Arecibo Observatory

Individual Investigator Programs (IIP)

Richard Barvainis Program Director Galactic Astronomy Glen Langston Program Director Ralph Gaume Division Director Jim Neff Deputy Division Director REU; EXC; ESP Matthew Benacquista Program Director Kenneth Johnston Expert CAREER; AAG Matthew Viau Program Analyst Allison Farrow Program Analyst Renee Adonteng Program Analyst (Pathways Student) Craig McClure Program Support Manager Donna O’Malley Financial & Operations Specialist Harshal Gupta Program Director Hans Krimm Program Director Peter Kurczynski Program Director Christopher Davis Program Director Joe Pesce Program Director David Boboltz Program Director Edward Ajhar Program Director Ashley Zauderer Program Director Nigel Sharp Program Director Ashley Zauderer Program Director Jonathan Williams Program Director Mid-Scale Innovations Program (MSIP) MSRI-1, MSRI-2 Richard Barvainis Program Director Luke Sollitt Program Director Harshal Gupta Program Director Green Bank Observatory Planetary Astronomy Martin Still Program Director Gemini Observatory Elizabeth Pentecost Project Administrator Sarah Higdon Program Director AAG Zoran Ninkov Program Director Advanced Technologies & Instrumentation
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SLIDE 9

Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS)

  • Anne Kinney, Assistant Director (AD) for

MPS, left NSF May 1, to become the GSFC Deputy Director in May 2020.

  • Sean Jones, Deputy AD, is acting AD.
  • Tie Luo, Deputy Division Director of the

Division of Mathematical Sciences is acting Deputy AD.

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SLIDE 10

NSF Office of the Director

  • France Córdova ended a 6-year term as

NSF Director March 31.

  • Sethuraman Panchanathan nominated by

President to be 15th NSF Director (07 Jan. 2020).

  • Kelvin Droegemeier named as Acting NSF

Director on April 1. Current Director of OSTP and former member of the National Science Board.

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SLIDE 11
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SLIDE 12

Facility Highlights

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SLIDE 13

NOIRLab

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SLIDE 14
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Gemini-N Lucky Imaging of Jupiter

  • Gemini-N has collected some of the

highest resolution images of Jupiter

  • btained from the ground.
  • Images are part of a multi-year joint

program with the Hubble Space Telescope in support of NASA’s Juno mission.

  • The facilities combined observe Jupiter’s

atmosphere as a system; revealing winds, gases, heat, and weather phenomena.

  • Images reveal that lightning strikes, and

some of the largest storm systems that create them, are formed in and around large convective cells over deep clouds of water ice and liquid.

  • Observations confirm that dark regions in

the Great Red Spot are gaps in the cloud cover and not due to cloud color variations.

Jupiter at 4.7 μm, compiled from a mosaic of separate pointings

  • bserved by the Gemini-N Observatory. Credit: International Gemini

Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, Wong et al. (2020) ApJS, 247, 2

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SLIDE 16

Cosmic Bubbles Reveal the First Stars

  • Astronomers using the infrared imager

NEWFIRM on the Mayall telescope on Kitt Peak have identified several

  • verlapping bubbles of hydrogen gas

ionized by some of the first stars formed after the cosmic dark ages, a mere 680 million years after the Big Bang.

  • Stars contained in EGS77 Galaxy group.
  • used to discover the two fainter galaxies

in the group discovered via NEWFIRM narrow-band imaging.

Rendition of ionized bubble formed by three galaxies, as imaged by the Mayall. Credit: V. Tilvi et al./NOIRLab/ KPNO/AURA.

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SLIDE 17

Barnard’s Galaxy

  • Barnard’s Galaxy, a dwarf galaxy

neighboring the Milky Way, is revealed in this stunning image from the Blanco 4-m telescope.

  • The image reveals regions of

intense star formation and a scattering of immense cosmic bubbles.

  • Glowing red regions of star

formation distributed throughout Barnard’s Galaxy indicate that star formation is widespread.

Barnard’s Galaxy imaged with NOIRLab’s 4-m Blanco Telescope at CTIO. Credit:

  • P. Massey (Lowell Obs.), G. Jacoby, K. Olsen & C. Smith (NOIRLab/AURA/NSF).

Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin

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SLIDE 18

GBT Detects Faint Repeating Fast Radio Burst

  • Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are mysterious energetic flashes of

radio emission originating from unknown extragalactic sources, and most were thought to be non-repeating

  • GBT follow-ups detected a very faint signals from FRB 171019 –

some 9 and 20 months after brighter bursts were found by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) – showing that this FRB repeats in time

  • The very high sensitivity of the GBT allowed detection of ~600x

fainter signals

Artist’s impression of FRB detection with the GBT (Credit: GBO/AUI/NSF; P. Vosteen)

  • More repeating faint FRBs missed by

less sensitive observations may be detectable with the GBT, helping to elucidate the nature of FRBs

GBT and ASKAP detections of FRB 171019 (Kumar et al. 2019, ApJL, 887, L30) (James et al. 2020, ApJL, 895, L22)

AAS NOVA Highlight, 29 January 2020

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NS NSF’s Arecibo

  • Observator
  • ry
  • Critical scientific observations

continued during challenging past few months

  • Detected “mask-shaped” asteroid
  • Expected to be largest asteroid to fly by

Earth this year

  • Distance ~16 times Earth-moon

distance

AO radar image of the potentially hazardous object, asteroid 1998 OR2.

Image Credit: Arecibo Observatory

Planetary Radar team led by Anne Virkki

(Image Credit: UCF)

AO Management Team led by the University of Central Florida

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SLIDE 20

ALMA Discovers Massive Rotating Disk in Early Universe

  • Observations by the Atacama Large

Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) show a massive disk galaxy, similar to our Milky Way, but at ~12.3 billion light years (the most distant rotating galaxy every

  • bserved).
  • The unprecedented resolution of ALMA allowed

measurement of the galaxy’s disk, indicating a rotation velocity of 272 km/sec (comparable to the Milky Way).

  • Follow-up observations by the Very Large Array and the

Hubble Space Telescope show a star formation rate 10x more than that of the Milky Way.

  • Such big, fully formed, galaxies are not expected so early

in the history of the universe – only 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.

  • The results appear in Nature, 20 May 2020

Top Right : An artist’s impression of the Wolfe Disk Bottom Right: The ALMA radio image of the disk galaxy.

Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello (top) and ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), M. Neeleman; NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello (bottom)

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SLIDE 21

Budget

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FY 2020 Budget

  • Continuing Resolution through Dec 20th .
  • Enacted Foundation appropriation increases R&RA 3% (to

$6,737M).

  • MREFC line fully funds LSST (Rubin Obs) at request level.
  • FY 2019 was last year for DKIST MREFC (per construction plans).
  • AST/AAG (grants program): should be reasonable year.
  • AST/MSIP (Astro. instrumentation): should be reasonable year.
  • NSF/Mid-scale RI-2 (MSRI-2) awards planned (programs in the

$20M - $70M range).

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SLIDE 23

Future budgets

  • President’s Budget Request (PBR) FY 2021 released Feb.
  • As in previous recent PBRs, funding requested for NSF is reduced from

recent fiscal year appropriations.

  • Recently, Congress has appropriated NSF funding above the PBR level.
  • Decadal funding:
  • Bipartisan support in Congress to ramp up Federal R&D funding in the

2020s.

  • For example: In late January House Science, Space, & Technology

Committee Republicans introduced Securing American Leadership in Science and Technology Act

  • F. Lucas (R-OK) (paraphrased): S&T is foundational for addressing generational

challenges: competition with China and climate change.

  • Increases NSF budget to $14.9B by 2029.
  • Long term impact of COVID-19 on economy ???
  • Endless Frontiers Act
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SLIDE 24

Vi Visit the he NSF F Booth h at AAS 236!