Comments from Carnegie (Mulchaey)

I sent a questionnaire out to all Carnegie scientists at OCIW, DTM
and LCO. I received 22 responses in total. I also held a meeting
this morning to discuss the results.

This is a summary of the survey & meeting:

First off, every instrument on the list was listed as "High" science
priority by at least one person at Carnegie. This demonstrates that
we have a very diverse pool of scientists. However, some instruments
are clearly in demand by a large fraction of our population, while others
will be used by just a few people.

We were able to put the instruments into three categories based on the
overall averages from the survey (High=2, Medium=1, Low=0):

Highest Priority
----------------
IMACS f/2   (1.43)
LDSS-2      (1.29)
Fourstar    (1.19)
Panic       (1.19)
Mike        (1.14)
IMACS f/4)  (1.10)

Medium Priority
---------------
IR echellette   (0.95)
IMACS Gismo     (0.90)
Megacam         (0.81)
F/11 adaptive Sec. (0.81)
IMACS MMTF      (0.76)
MMIRS           (0.71)

Lowest Priority
----------------
MagE            (0.62)
MIRACS4 with A0 (0.57)
IMACS multi. echellette (0.52)
Magic           (0.48)
B&C             (0.48)
Mike Fibers     (0.33)
MIRAC4 without AO (0.14)

After much discussion, it was agreed that the highest priority instruments
are the ones that we all believe should be facility instruments. They are
used by many people for many different kinds of science and should be fully
supported by the LCO staff.

The second tier are instruments that are all in development. It was felt
that some of them will likely make good facility instruments, while others
might be more appropriate as visitor (=PI) instruments. In particular,
the f5 instruments and f/11 A) secondary will likely be available for
limited runs and it might make more sense to consider than visitor
instruments, shifting more responsibility to the instrument teams to
support them.

The third tier is composed of mostly niche instruments. These will likely
not be used by many folks at Carnegie, but are still very important for a
few people. These would also be good candidate visitor instruments. It is
generally agreed that the level of use of these instruments is not sufficient
to warrant facility instrument status. The two exceptions are the B&C and
Magic, which ranked low because at least among most Carnegie observers,
this science can be done with LDSS-2. In our minds, these would be good
choices for early retirement, although Magic has some capabilities that
might be useful to other consortium partners. Still, if Magic's overall
use is low, perhaps it can move to visitor instrument status.

As you can probably tell from the above discussion, it was generally felt
that too many instruments are in the running for facility status. Perhaps
this is an issue for us to revisit at the SAC. However, it was also agreed
that visitor instruments also tax the mountain resources and this must be
taken in to account. The differences between visitor and facility instruments
is still not clear to the community (or to me for that matter!)