By COLIN M. STEWART
Tribune-Herald Staff Writer
The University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy is currently working to beef up faculty and equipment at its Hilo facility, despite cutbacks in some funding sources.
While the institute is based in Manoa, it is charged with managing the Mauna Kea Observatories on the Big Island, as well as the Haleakala Observatories on Maui. In early 2001, the IfA completed an $11 million, 35,000-square-foot, split-level building at 640 North Aohoku Place to serve as its main Hilo base facility.
The plan, said IfA Director Guenther Hasinger, was to fill the facility with staff, faculty and equipment from the get-go, and to rapidly turn it into, among other things, an “instrumentation center of excellence,” to build and test state-of-the art equipment used by astronomers.
But then organizers began running into budgetary roadblocks.
“It was constructed 12 years ago with the original intent to put more stuff in there,” he said. “They were hoping to get more money from the (Legislature) to build up the Hilo complex.”
Over the years, the institute has added equipment and people piecemeal as funding became available, Hasinger said. Faculty members are expected to earn their keep, so to speak, by snagging valuable grants to fund projects.
Currently, the facility houses five faculty members and about 80 employees. By comparison, the IfA’s Manoa facility houses 30 faculty members and 200 employees, and its Maui facility hosts three faculty and 40 staffers.
The building itself features a bevy of machine shops and laboratories for the development and maintenance of scientific instruments and telescopes, a library, an auditorium and remote telescope operation rooms connected via fiber optic cable to the observatories atop Mauna Kea.
It all serves to keep the Big Island at the top of the heap when it comes to groundbreaking astronomy.
“Because with Mauna Kea we have the mountain as a big attraction, and with new telescopes coming, like the Thirty Meter Telescope. Also, with the Keck telescopes, which are still the most powerful telescopes in the world … it gives us in Hilo certain specific niches where we are world-leading,” he said.
But in addition to the equipment and the location, the IfA can’t function without top people. Now, the institute is working to add new faculty positions, and administrators hope to continue building upon their expertise and abilities on-hand going forward, Hasinger said.
“In Hilo, right now, we’re hiring a new faculty member. We have an ad out, and we hope by April we will have a new person,” he said. “Additionally, we already have one adaptive optics specialist, and we’ll need another.”
Adaptive optics is a relatively new technology that has helped to provide clearer pictures of space. One of the biggest problems scientists face when looking through telescopes is seeing through the Earth’s atmosphere, Hasinger explained. Images from distant objects appear blurry after traveling through the turbulent air around our planet. Ideally, the best images come from space, where there is no atmosphere to interfere. Such is the purpose of programs like the Hubble Space Telescope. But, such options are rare and very expensive.
Ground-based alternatives seek to place telescopes as high as possible, which is what makes Mauna Kea such a great location. But even at the summit, there is still much atmosphere to contend with. Adaptive optics allows a telescope’s mirror to adapt to the rapid fluctuations in light waves to provide a steadier picture, and Hilo’s IfA is a world leader in building such instrumentation, said Associate Director Klaus Hodapp. And the hope is to keep that status growing.
“The intent is certainly to ramp up our activities,” he said.
Hodapp said that the IfA has received funding from various sources over the past decade, with big projects like the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), which would be used to spot threats from asteroids and comets, being funded by the government.
“Originally, funding was planned in the public domain for the past decade. That was earmark funding that was put into the defense budget and came to us as funding from the Air Force. But that funding stream has now been disrupted,” he said.
With the cutbacks, the Pan-STARRS project, which originally called for a system of two telescopes on Maui and two on the Big Island, will likely now be limited to the one telescope now in operation on Maui, and a second which is currently being fabricated and planned for installation on Maui, Hodapp said.
In the new budgetary environment, the IfA has worked to find ways to keep its older equipment up to date by adding high-tech instruments that provide better and better data for scientists to continue making advances.
“Obviously, modern telescopes work better than old telescopes,” he said, “but we’re working to bring our equipment back up to competitive scientific capabilities. We’re hiring additional faculty members in certain technologies, and concentrating on certain aspects.”
In a Thursday tour of the Hilo facility, Hodapp showed off some of the instruments that are currently in development in the IfA’s labs. Among them were items like high definition cameras and cryostat containers, which are designed to cool infrared detectors to temperatures near absolute zero, preventing them from picking up extraneous heat signatures that might throw off their readings of infrared from distant stars and other heavenly bodies.
Some of the instruments are being fabricated and tested for other programs at various institutions around the world.
“We can build things here that they can’t do,” Hodapp said. “And we’re happy to do it. It keeps money flowing in, and it keeps our skills up.”
For more information on the Institute for Astronomy, visit http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/.
Email Colin M. Stewart at cstewart@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
