How does a minor university land a major observatory? In New Mexico Tech’s case, it helped that the university has access to a high, dark site, that the Magdalena Ridge Observatory (MRO) will have national security applications, and that the project has allies in Congress.
“We had a coalition of universities looking for an observatory,” says Van Romero, vice president for research at New Mexico Tech (officially the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology), which has around 1800 students and 110 faculty members. New Mexico Tech and its partners—New Mexico State University, New Mexico Highlands University, and the University of Puerto Rico—learned that the US Army’s neighboring White Sands Missile Range wanted better missile tracking capability and the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque was interested in developing adaptive optics. “We seemed to have a critical mass—universities, along with more than one military user,” says Romero. Representative Joe Skeen...
