We plan to develop the Fenton Hill site, the former Hot Dry Rock site, TA-57, as a field station for basic research, outreach, educational, and programmatic activities. This site is uniquely suited to a wide range of activities not otherwise possible at Los Alamos because of its distance from sources of light and its high altitude. This site is ideal for users from other research and educational institutions, will represent a source of revenue to the Laboratory, an incubator for new scientific collaborations, and a base for educational outreach for Northern New Mexico. This site is also being considered as a candidate for a University of California Research Station, under the auspices of the UC Institute for Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (INPAC). This status could also bring some new revenue for the Laboratory in the way of UC funds, and opportunities to apply for NSF and private foundation money, and would also attract further new opportunities for research collaborations. Some investment of Laboratory funds is necessary to realize these attractive possibilities.
The primary focus of our research activities lies in the area of transient astronomical sources, and has relevance to topics of widespread astrophysical importance such as particle acceleration, superluminal events, and uncatalogued sources. The most enigmatic of such sources, the gamma-ray bursters, were discovered by Los Alamos scientists with instruments on satellites designed for treaty verification purposes. Despite being known for over thirty years, there is still no consensus as to what they are. Counterparts to these sources at other wavelengths are only now being detected, because catching a burster in the act requires a substantial dedicated effort and fast computers and networks for rapid alert generation. Other types of transient sources, such as active galactic nuclei and flaring stars, require long-term monitoring with dedicated modest-size telescopes. Traditional astronomical observatories do not handle either rapid alert-response or long-term monitoring very well, because they schedule observing time well in advance.
We are developing a plan for an Observatory for Time-domain Astronomy (OTA) to be sited at Fenton Hill. This observatory will differ from most astronomical observatories in that it will concentrate on the mostly unexplored portions of the time domain: the variability of celestial objects on time scales from fractions of a second to hours. Several components of this observatory have already been identified, including some relatively inexpensive optical and radio telescopes, in collaboration with a variety of institutions from around the country (e.g. U Mich, LLNL, LBL, UCSB, UCSD, UCI, UNM, NRAO). We need an investment from LANL to establish a modest working observatory for time-domain astronomy and to explore the development of this site as a magnet for attracting additional investment and new research partners.
A very important aspect of this Observatory is its explicit educational mission and outreach programs. Astronomy is a science in which the public takes great interest, and it has long been seen as a way of attracting young people to the pursuit of scientific and technological careers. We have already undertaken a partnership with the Hands-On Universe (HOU) program, run by Carl Pennypacker at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, through which we are obtaining a telescope for Fenton Hill that will be used partly by HOU for interactive web-based astronomy in classrooms around the world. We are currently recruiting teachers from New Mexico to participate in HOU workshops so that the benefits of this program will accrue directly to schoolchildren in our state. In the summer of 1997 we hosted an Earthwatch Student Challenge Awards Program, funded by the Durfee Foundation, in which 8 highly talented high school students from all over the U.S. spent two weeks working with us to field-test our CCD cameras and telescopes and make some preliminary measurements of astronomical seeing at Fenton Hill and other sites. The students profited greatly from the experience, many of them vowing to return once we have an observatory established, as can be seen from their comments in their expedition log. Expressions of interest in local outreach and educational programs that we might develop at Fenton Hill have been offered by Jemez Pueblo, Zia Pueblo, San Ildefonso Pueblo, the Bradbury Science Museum, the Planetarium at Santa Fe Community College, Northern New Mexico Community College, UNM-LA, and Highlands University. But the development of such programs requires an infrastructure that does not yet exist. Additionally, with the help of Mike Zeilik at UNM, we have initiated a proposal for an NSF REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) site involving astrophysical transients and centered on Fenton Hill. We have also won a DOE HiCREST grant with New Mexico State University and UNM for the building of an Air Cherenkov experiment on the site.
In this Program Development proposal, we are requesting funds to work on establishing the first components of the observatory, to begin operations, and to develop proposals for further research and education projects at the observatory.
As the Fenton Hill site becomes better known, we will attract other institutions to field instruments there. A number of universities are developing plans for new observatories and looking for suitable sites. The high cost of developing a brand-new site often argues in favor of a site that already has roads, power, and communications such as Fenton Hill. We have such a high-altitude site that is also very dark, has existing arrangements with the Forest Service, and is likely to be suitable for a wide variety of astronomical projects. Some organizations (e.g. U Iowa, UBC) have already expressed interest in Fenton Hill, and have begun evaluating it for their needs. The institutions bringing telescopes to Fenton Hill will contribute to the maintenance and further development of the site. Research and educational funding will be attracted by the scientific instrumentation on the site. We anticipate that a modest investment by the Laboratory in the development of infrastructure for Fenton Hill will result in an increase in revenue from site fees and from collaborative research funded by external agencies, and a growth of basic research and educational funding for the operation of these facilities.
A variety of programmatic activities are also made possible by the dark skies and remoteness of Fenton Hill. Free-space quantum cryptography using visible light links to satellites, ultra-low-light imaging experiments for remote sensing, and low-intensity lidar plume discrimination are examples of these. The OTA itself will be a very large source of complex data, and will provide experience in the prompt detection of rare events and in handling multi-dimensional datasets that will prove relevant for a variety of programs at Los Alamos, including those that support nonproliferation treaties, national security, and science-based stockpile stewardship.
The technology involved in establishing an observatory for transient astronomy includes telescopes in several wavelength regimes, appropriate software and computational hardware for digesting enormous quantities of data in real time, robotic components to ensure that data is taken whenever conditions are appropriate, network links to bring the data to the attention of researchers and to provide alerts (in both directions), and massive data storage equipment. An element in this observatory, funded separately and already under construction, is the Milagro ultra-high energy gamma-ray telescope, which already does remote unattended observing and demonstrates the capabilities we have for carrying out this work. The optical component of Fenton Hill Observatory includes, so far, three components: ATOMIC (Astrophysical Transient Observatory Multiple-Imaging Cameras), an optical all-sky monitor that looks at most of overhead sky, most of the time, at very low resolution; ROTSE (Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment), a fast-slew, wide-field telescope with a field of view of 16 degrees and resolution of a few arc minutes; and REACT (Research and Education Automatically Controlled Telescope), a fast-slew, modest aperture telescope with a field of view of a fraction of a degree and resolution of a second of arc. Of these, ROTSE and REACT are well under development, while ATOMIC is still in conceptional stage. All of these use imaging CCD cameras with multi-position filter wheels. Their characteristics are summarized in the following table: