On 7 July David Silva took the job of guiding the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in a period of redefinition. “NOAO had begun to stagnate,” he says. But a 2006 review by NSF “clarified our mission [see Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 59 12 2006 32 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2435673 December 2006, page 32 ]. NOAO is the natural focal point for providing open access for the entire US astronomical community to a broad range of world-class optical–IR capabilities. It’s important that we revitalize our core.”
As part of the revitalization, NOAO is “trying to build a national system of the existing 2- and 4-meter telescopes to share capabilities, and we’ve been given a mission by NSF to find ways to feed money into instrumentation for 6–10-meter-class telescopes,” Silva says. Perhaps most significantly, in 2006 NOAO withdrew as the public partner in the Thirty Meter Telescope to instead represent the broader US...
