FUAP

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Welcome to the public FUAP webpage

Contents

Introduction

This is the main public webpage for FUAP (Far Universe Advisory Panel), which is one of five advisory panels set-up by the STFC Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics Science Committee, or PPAN. The science remit of FUAP covers parts of the astronomy and space science programmes concerned with the global properties of our galaxy, with objects beyond our galaxy, and with cosmology.

FUAP was establish in March 2009 and the present panel members are:

This webpage will provide the community with the latest information on FUAP and its activities. Please send any comments to Bob Nichol

Panel Vision

The official tasks of FUAP and other advisory panels can be found on the PPAN webpage. We have broadly interpreted these tasks to be:

  • A long-term science roadmap for the extra-galactic community which we will be updated over the coming years and provide PPAN and STFC with our science priorities for the coming decades.
  • A positive statement on the facilities, projects and experiments needed both today and in the future to achieve the science roadmap and maintain UK leadership in strategic areas.
  • A broad view of the UK science productivity, which could include all aspects of a successful and healthy UK astronomical community.

Synergy with other panels and reviews

STFC and PPAN have initiated a number of parallel advisory panels and reviews, all of which will be seeking public consultation over the remainder of 2009. There is clearly some overlap between these panels/reviews, and the chairs of these panels/reviews will work hard to coordinate and collaborate with each other. Each panel/review will have its own style and schedule, which reflects their priorities and their communities.

We are acutely aware that the STFC community is tired of these consultation exercises and we appreciate this concern when we will ask for community input. We stress that FUAP is taking a long-term approach and our philosophy is akin to the previous Astronomy Advisory Panel (AAP), which was part of the old PPARC advisory structure. Your input will be vital and we ask for your patience as we set-up these panels/reviews and work together.

We provide below some information on other related panels/reviews and highlight where possible the differences:

  • Near Universe Advisory Panel (NUAP) is chaired by Michele Dougherty and is focused on the contents of our Galaxy. This panel has the same overall remit as FUAP but will interpret it in their own style appropriate for their community. NUAP have already started their consultation and details can be found on their STFC webpage. We are aware that some science topics will straddle the boundary between NUAP and FUAP, and the chairs of these two panels will coordinate such issues. If in doubt, we suggest people contact the chairs of NUAP & FUAP and/or feel free to submit comments and input to both panels. Overlap in the science covered by these two panels is not necessarily a problem as it will ensure PPAN receives the advice it needs, and it may have a stronger voice if multiple panels repeat the same message.
  • Particle Astrophysics Advisory Panel (PAAP) is chaired by Philip Mauskopf and there are obvious potential overlaps with FUAP, e.g., CMB research, cosmic-ray experiments, etc. As stated above for NUAP, the chairs of these panels will coordinate and discuss such overlaps, and provide a coherent view to PPAN. Again, overlap in the science covered by the panels is not necessarily a problem as it will ensure PPAN receives the advice it needs, and it may have a stronger voice if multiple panels repeat the same message.
  • Ground-based Review (GBR) is chaired by Michael Rowan-Robinson and was established by STFC to review present and future optical/IR/radio facilities available to UK astronomers. This review is focused mainly on such facilities and is tasked with performing a major community review of these facilities before the Autumn. The GBR will report to STFC and the PPAN advisory panels by the end of October, and will then be dissolved.
  • Other past and present reviews and panels. The FUAP members are already studying related reports from past and present astronomical reviews. For example, we are aware of the ASTRONET process, the previous Programmatic Review documents from last year, AAP, the ESO-ESA report on Fundamental Cosmology (Peacock et al.) and various reports in the USA. Our philosophy is to start with these as inputs to our panel and build upon them for the coming years. Please feel to send us related material as input to our deliberations.

Schedule

The FUAP schedule is still being discussed but below we provide a preliminary outline of what we are intending during 2009. We will update this plan when we have firm dates and deadlines. We will announce any consultation periods to the community via the usual email lists.

  • May 2009 - finish writing science strategy document ready for first consultation
  • June 2009 - begin first web-based consultation with community on FUAP science strategy document (close late June/early July)
  • July/August 2009 - begin mapping UK facilities and projects to key UK science goals
  • Sept 2009 - begin second face-to-face consultation potentially including town meetings, departmental visits and individual interviews (TBD)
  • Oct 2009 - first report/presentation to PPAN with input from GBR and other advisory panels.
  • Dec 2009 - announcement of STFC prioritization exercise (see below)

Public Consultation and STFC Prioritization Exercise

Web Questionnaire

On June 24th, we announced the opening of our first community consultation for our initial Science Strategy document (Media:Fuap-science-strategy-document.pdf‎). All contributions by July 10th 2009 will be much appreciated and carefully considered.

This web consultation is now closed and we received 98 submissions. Thank you. We are busy digesting them and will report soon on our next step.

Facility Prioritization Process

Once the overall scientific strategy has been agreed, we will proceed to map facilities onto science goals. To gauge the priority of any facility we will use the following criteria.

1) Scientific excellence

2) UK/International leadership

3) Cross-disciplinary impact (e.g. theory+observation)

4) Value for money (e.g. exploit ESA membership)

5) Social/economic impact

The community will be given the opportunity to comment on the results before submission to STFC.

Town Meeting

We will hold a public town meeting the afternoon (2-5pm) of September 14th 2009 at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester. At this meeting, FUAP will discuss their final science strategy, as well as present their preliminary thoughts on the priorities of generic facilities needed to deliver this science strategy. This is an opportunity to help FUAP strike the right balance for important STFC budget decisions coming in the Autumn.

We provide below the key documents presented at this meeting:

Approximately 50 people attended the meeting and we will digest the feedback received at the meeting. We also received in excess of 60 responses before Sept 21st via our second web-based form. Many thanks for all your comments and they were all considered. Unfortunately we cannot provide individual replies.


Final report to PPAN

We provide here our final report to PPAN (Media:FUAP-report-PPAN-FINAL.pdf) in advance of this autumns funding decisions. We received several comments from people before October 8th, which we have included where appropriate. Thanks for all your help and we are now taking a short break until our November 30th meeting with PPAN.

Results of Programmatic Review

On Dec 16th 2009, STFC released the results of the programmatic review, entitled Investing in the Future. This re-prioritization has a huge impact on Far Universe science as the whole PPAN budget has been shrunk by £28M over the next 3 years. Below is a joint statement from all the PPAN Advisory Panels in response to this re-prioritization.

Response from Advisory Panels

(Dec 22nd 2009)

To: Prof. Michael Sterling, Chair, STFC Council

CC: Keith Mason Richard Wade John Womersley Jenny Thomas Jordan Nash

Dear Prof. Sterling,

We are writing as Chairs of the Advisory Panels to PPAN concerning the outcome of the Programmatic Review. The outcome has caused significant pain and uncertainty within the Nuclear Physics, Particle Physics, Particle Astrophysics, Astronomy and Space Science communities.

PPAN were clearly put in an impossible situation with a budget decreasing by £28M over the next 3 years, which will leave some of our communities in a barely sustainable position. Whilst the set of supported projects is broadly consistent with the priorities expressed by the community via the Advisory Panel roadmap reports, there are some clear exceptions on which each Panel plans to seek clarification. However, the outcome of the Review is, due to the financial constraints, a programme that has been severely narrowed in its coverage of the major scientific questions in Particle Physics, Nuclear Physics and Astronomy and which:

  • wastes much of the significant prior investment made by the UK in forefront science;
  • results in termination of UK leadership in a number of significant areas;
  • leaves almost no room for developing future UK strategic opportunities for advancing the scientific frontier, with relevant KE impact, 10-20 years from now;
  • sends a very negative message to bright young people (through significant cuts in studentships, fellowships and grants) about the importance the UK places in cutting-edge, fundamental science, and the career opportunities that follow from training in these areas. We urge PPAN and Science Board to revisit the decision on studentships and fellowships, even within the present financial constraints.


We urge you to seek every opportunity to gain additional resources for the science programme so that the damage can at least be reduced relative to the current outcome. Lord Drayson has recently made statements that recognise this dire situation and expressed a desire to ameliorate it.

We welcome the statements made by John Womersley at the briefing meeting for Advisory Panels on December 18th. John outlined a clear need for further community input via the Advisory Panels on the crucially important details of the implementation plan - there is clearly still some head-room for the scientific damage caused by the cuts and 'managed withdrawals' to be further limited. However, we would like to understand better the timescale, procedure and mechanism by which we can provide this input.

The Advisory Panels acknowledge the community support and input into their summer 2009 consultation exercises, which formed the basis of our roadmap reports and advice to PPAN in October 2009. We intend to continue working with our communities to optimise, as far as possible, the details of a terrible outcome.

Sincerely,

Philip Burrows (PPAP), Michele Dougherty (NUAP), Martin Freer (NPAP), Philip Mauskopf (PAAP), Bob Nichol (FUAP),

Media:burrows.pdf The reply from Prof. Sterling (Chair of STFC Council)

Open Letter to Lord Drayson

(12th Jan 2010)

The chairs of the five PPAN advisory panels authored a join open letter to Lord Drayson outlining the likely impact of STFC cuts on fundamental research in the UK. This letter was published in theTimes Higher Education Supplement alongside an article on the situations.


Response from FUAP

To: Prof. Jordan Nash, Chair of PPAN

(Dec 22nd 2009)

CC: John Womersley Sheila Rowan Jenny Thomas Mike Bode Bob Warwick

Dear Jordan,

We are writing to you as chair of PPAN regarding the outcome of the recent STFC prioritization exercise. We recognize the tough decisions PPAN had to make given your decreasing budget over the next 3 years, but seek clarification on a number of issues where our initial FUAP advice appears to be different from your outcome. These include:

  • Cuts to the studentships, fellowships and grants. In our FUAP report, we ranked the maintenance of these items as our top critical priority and in person, we have continued to stress their importance. We echo the request in the recent joint statement from all the AP chairs that PPAN and Science Board revisit this decision immediately and try to mitigate the effect of such cuts to the next generation of UK scientists. In particular please review the removal of the entire PDF round this year. In our opinion, this is a very negative message to send especially in these tough times of youth unemployment.
  • The withdrawal from LOFAR which was highlighted by FUAP as one of our "Crown Jewels" over the next 5 years and was also "high priority" in the GBFR report. LOFAR addresses two of the four FUAP science themes (First Light, Extreme Astrophysics) and is a very cost-effective (for the UK) pathfinder to the SKA. At the Dec 18th briefing meeting with John Womersley, there was some confusion over whether FUAP could undertake an investigation of the decision to not support LOFAR and we request your advice on this. We believe the radio astronomy community would be open to sharing their constrained resources to partially support LOFAR.
  • The withdrawal from XMM-Newton, which was also highlighted by FUAP as one of our "Crown Jewels" over the next 5 years. XMM will be vital to addressing questions in Extreme Astrophysics and represents one of the most successful ESA missions ever flown. ESA has given top priority to continued support of XMM in the coming years and we are thus puzzled that this is not reflected in your decision, particularly given the vital core roles of the UK in data processing and instrument calibration. Continued support for XMM seems very cost-effective and we seek clarification if this withdrawal also includes UK scientists seeking exploitation funds via grants, studentships and fellowships?
  • We note that the UK has no access to future CMB experiments after Planck. Given the success of CMB research over the last decade in providing us with the cosmological standard model, we feel this could be disastrous for our standing in the worldwide cosmology community. We urge PPAN to look at this area of research asap as we fear it is barely sustainable now.
  • Access to telescopes in the northern Hemisphere. As discussed by John Womersley at the Dec 18th briefing, it is noticeable that the UK will potentially loose all telescopes in the north by 2012. This is against the advice of FUAP, NUAP and the GBFR. We seek your advice on how to deal with this outcome and stress that three of the FUAP science themes require access to the whole sky (Galaxies, Extreme Astrophysics, First Light). Not having such access will significantly damage our exploitation of highly ranked (and supported) facilities such as GAIA, Advanced-LIGO and Swift.

We hope PPAN can provide a clear steer on these issues as John Womersley indicated on Dec 18th that some "fiddling" was possible. We do appreciate the impossible position you were placed in with a decreasing budget, but feel that some of the above issues are so important they are worth revisiting even in these tough financial circumstances. We are eager to help and ready to provide informed input (with public consultation if needed) over the coming month.

Yours sincerely

Sarah Bridle Anthony Challinor Chris Conselice Shude Mao Rob Fender Bob Nichol (chair) Paul O'Brien

Meetings and Phone-cons

FUAP have already met several times via phone and face-to-face meetings. In the spirit of openness and transparency, we provide below the minutes to those meetings and plan to continue to do this in the future.

Private pages

We provide here a few private pages which are designed just for the FUAP. Login is required to see and edit these pages (Please read the Access rights before editing!) .

Retrieved from "http://research.icg.port.ac.uk/wikis/fuap/FUAP"
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