Revitalizing NOAO

On 7 July David Silva took the job of guiding the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in a period of redefinition. “NOAO had begun to stagnate,” he says. But a 2006 review by NSF “clarified our mission [see Physics Today, December 2006, page 32 ]. NOAO is the natural focal point for providing open access for the entire US astronomical community to a broad range of world-class optical–IR capabilities. It’s important that we revitalize our core.”

As part of the revitalization, NOAO is “trying to build a national system of the existing 2- and 4-meter telescopes to share capabilities, and we’ve been given a mission by NSF to find ways to feed money into instrumentation for 6–10-meter-class telescopes,” Silva says. Perhaps most significantly, in 2006 NOAO withdrew as the public partner in the Thirty Meter Telescope to instead represent the broader US astronomy community’s participation in both the TMT, where Silva once worked, and the other US-led extremely large telescope in the works, the Giant Magellan Telescope (see the story on page 28 ).

Earlier he oversaw data management and user support at the European Southern Observatory, and at NOAO in the 1990s he served as project manager during the commissioning of the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope and as a staff astronomer at the US office of the Gemini Observatory. He succeeds Todd Boroson, who served as interim director after Jeremy Mould stepped down in April 2007.