The wide fields-of-view and scheduling flexibility of 1.0-m class telescopes make them excellent tools for monitoring periodically-variable and transient objects, carrying out large area surveys, and pre- or post-observations for large aperture or space-based telescopes. Operating costs are significantly reduced for robotic networks compared with on-site observing stations, and networks that cover a wide longitudinal baseline are essential for avoiding diurnal and seasonal cycle count ambiguities in variable sources.
Dr. Matt Wood, Texas A&M University-Commerce, intends to augment the facilities operated by the Southeastern Association for Research in Astronomy (SARA) telescope consortium, which already include the 0.9-m reflector at Kitt Peak National Observatory and the 0.6-m telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, with the recently-acquired 1.0-m Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT) at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, Canary Islands, to form a 3-telescope robotic telescope network covering more than 90 degrees of longitude. The new telescope will be outfitted with an improved secondary mirror, upgraded telescope drives and encoders, a CCD photometric camera, and the same dome control/weather monitoring software that is used on the other SARA telescopes. The science to be enabled is well-suited to the emerging field of time-domain astronomy: asteroids, cataclysmic variables and other types of binary stars, active galactic nuclei, and gamma-ray burst events, and includes topics that are already research foci for consortium astronomers.
The remote operation of the JKT is expected to allow SARA to add a minimum of 4 new members to the 11-member consortium, and will extend the philosophy of ensuring that member faculty and students have access to versatile, capable observational facilities. These institutions, with relatively small departments of astronomy and physics, are typically under-represented in the national research arena, but are important instructional forums for scientific research because they allow undergraduate and graduate students to carry out their thesis and capstone projects using consortium facilities. Being able to remotely observe at a facility 6 hours ahead of the eastern seaboard will also improve SARA's ability to perform public outreach events in the U.S.
Funding for development and construction of the prototype spectrograph is being provided by NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences through its participation in the Major Research Instrumentation program.
