Expanding Policy

ROTSE Collaboration Expanding Policy

Since the advent of the January 23rd event, it has become increasingly clear that extending the global coverage of ROTSE would be extremely desirable. The main theme of our NASA SR&T proposal is to do just that.   Consequently, preliminary discussions have already begun with people located in Australia, the Canary Islands and Chile. We urgently need to define a policy now which will protect our own interests while providing a friendly and beneficial opportunity for those who might choose to join. Here are some varied thoughts on this somewhat complex subject:

Equipment:

We expect to eventually acquire a total of ten 0.45 meter telescopes over the next three years. The owners and sponsors are as follows:

Transfer of any of this equipment to remote parts of the globe requires permission of the owning institution. Transfer of equipment acquired as part of a Federally-funded collaborative effort requires the consent of the membership. I expect that the owning institution will retain title to any equipment although whether stuff ever returns home is probably moot.

Geographic locations:

Our principle goal is to install instruments in both northern and southern hemispheres with uniform coverage in longitude. A minimal set of six locations might include New Mexico, Canary Islands, Israel, Australia, Chile and South Africa. Other possibilities include Armenia, China, India and Iran but political instabilities discourage such sites for the immediate future. We might also consider other sites within North America to improve observing efficiencies marred by weather. This is of secondary scientific importance although it has the virtue of being significantly easier to accomplish. Initiating any foreign observatory is a labor-intensive task so we need to be cautious about staging our commitments.

Selection of foreign collaborators:

Sustaining any collaboration is a non-trivial exercise, much less one which deliberately attempts to span the entire planet. It is an operating assumption that ROTSE instruments will be constructed entirely with US funds. Once the equipment arrives at the country of destination, further costs must be born by the host institution with the exception of repairs of major equipment (ie. CCD cameras). This means that the host must have sufficient resources to support a technician at a level not to exceed one day per week. The host institution must also provide scientific personnel sufficient to make a daily check of instrument performance (last night's data) and reduce burst data obtained locally. This should be understood as a minimal requirement; I would hope and expect that at least one host member would be interested enough to make ROTSE data a major focus of his or her research. Less quantifiable but substantially more important are the intellectual abilities that such people will bring to the collaboration. The people must have good scientific judgement and discretion since GRBs are currently a very trendy field and noise gets amplified quickly. Obviously, whoever is doing any data reduction work must have sufficient familiarity with imaging techniques to be able to work effectively with the ROTSE software. Foreign membership must also pass the same criteria that we would require of US participants.

Foreign membership rights and privileges:

My own personal opinion is that there should be only one class of collaboration membership. This means that any data taken by any ROTSE instrument is fair game to all. It is understood that individuals will want to stake out specific areas of interest. Since there is such a large body of data to investigate, overlap of effort should not be a serious problem. For the most urgent topics such as GRB observations, some overlap is both desirable and encouraged. However, it is conceivable that abuse of this policy will occur in which case it will be dealt with specifically. The issue of authorship, whatever we decide to adopt, should be uniform across the collaboration. I would expect that the use of the ROTSE telescopes would encompass both programmatic observations common to the collaboration plus specific observations of interest to a more limited subset of people. We need to define the fraction of time which can be allocated to secondary missions. I would suggest 30% as a reasonable compromise as long as GRB triggers are not inhibited.

To be included in the revised version: