[ASA] Formation of the Veloce Science Team

[Chris Tinney]

Dear Colleagues,

The AAO will be proceeding with Concept Designs 
over the next 9 months for two instruments as 
potential next generation facilities for the 
AAT - HECTOR and Veloce.

Put simply, Veloce aims to equip the Anglo-Australian 
Telescope with a compact ultra-stabilised spectrograph, 
able to obtain Doppler velocities for Sun-like and 
M-dwarf stars at sub-m/s precision. 

In addition, it will provide essentially all 
the functionality delivered by the current UCLES 
spectrograph, but collect light from a larger 
area on the sky (i.e have an ~3" diameter aperture using
a CYCLOPS-style IFU, as compared with
UCLES' 1" slit), large simultaneous wavelength 
coverage (~390nm-1um),  higher spectral resolution, 
and better throughput.

As well as the AAO's work on exploring the 
instrumental design aspects (and their cost) for 
Veloce, a Science Team is being put together to
formulate example science cases that can drive
the Veloce design.

The Veloce Science Team would therefore like
to invite all those in Australia interested in 
high-resolution echelle spectroscopy of any sort, 
to join us in developing the strongest science
case possible.

To start the ball rolling, a web page has been created at

http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~cgt/cgt/Veloce.html

and am looking to identify additional astronomers 
who want to take part, with a view to organising 
a first meeting of the Science Team (either virtually, 
or physically somewhere in Sydney) within the next 4-6 weeks.

So if you are interested, please look at the web site
and the current Veloce position paper available there,
and let me know if you would like to be involved.

Cheers

Chris Tinney (for the Veloce Science Team)

Martin Asplund (ANU), Tim Bedding (U.Syd), Jeremy Bailey (UNSW),
Daniel Bayliss (ANU), Joao Bento (Macquarie), Jade Carter-Bond (UNSW),
Tobias Ferger (Macquarie), Ken Freeman (ANU), Michael Ireland (Macquarie),
Sarah Martell (AAO), Simon O'Toole (AAO), Dennis Stello (U.Syd), 
Chris Tinney (UNSW), Rob Wittenmyer (UNSW), Duncan Wright (UNSW)


---------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Chris Tinney,  Professorial Fellow.    (c.tinney at unsw.edu.au)
Dept of Astrophysics, UNSW. +61 2 93855168  www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~cgt
---------------------------------------------------------------------