The future of San Pedro Mártir. An Ongoing Long History of International Collaboration in Mexico

Astronomy has been an international science for several centuries and Mexico has had an important part in this story. The voyages of the Chappe d’Auteroche to San José del Cabo, Baja California Sur, to observe the transit of Venus in 1769, then the one directed by Francisco Díaz Covarrubias of Mexican astronomers who travelled to Japan for the following transit, or, since the founding of the National Astronomi Observatory (OAN) in 1878, the Carte du Ciel project, the installation of the first telescope (1.5 meters) in San Pedro Mártir, and all of the recently installed telescopes are all examples of this history of international collaborations.

Projects in astrophysics today are ever larger and more complex, and require personnel from many institutions to undertake them successfully. In contrast to traditional telescopes, these modern projects usually have very specific scientific objectives to solve particular problems and so they require very specialized instrumentation.

It might be surprising, but there are few ideal locations where optical-infrared telescopes may be located. Places that combine dark and clear skies, with low humidity, few clouds, and little turbulence are rare worldwide.  They are truly natural resources found only in high mountains near the oceans. Although these characteristics are all natural, the darkness and clarity of the skies are very sensitive to local human activity, to demographic growth, and economic development. Maintaining dark and clear skies often requires legally sanctioned deliberate environmental protection. The Sierra de San Pedro Mártir is one of these privileged sites and, luckily, has some of the legal protection required.

What will the OAN at Sierra de San Pedro Mártir be like in the future? Many factors will play a role, but its development will basically depend upon investment in infrastructure and personnel. Installing and commissioning infrastructure is only the beginning. It also requires maintenance during its operational lifetime, which typically reaches 5 to 15 per cent per year of its initial cost. The OAN at Sierra de San Pedro Mártir is part of UNAM’s Astronomy Institute, so its future will be defined by the ability of its personnel to identify key problems and create the collaborations required to address them.

It is likely that the OAN at Sierra de San Pedro Mártir will continue to develop through international collaborations target-specific scientific questions, as it does currently. I hope that surveys will figure prominently because we still have much to learn about the many connections between evolutionary states of stars and galaxies. Topics spanning from our Solar System and exoplanets, to the gas, dust, and stars within our Milky Way and beyond are among the many possibilities. One thing is understanding that stars with certain characteristics produce different kinds of remnants, but the complete accounting of how many there are of each type is powerfully informative, though often lacking, when trying to establish the importance and variability of the processes that are responsible for the transformations between precursors and remnants. The study of variability in objects both nearby and far away is particularly promising. For instance, while we understand that active galactic nuclei arise due to the feeding of supermassive black holes in their centers, we still don’t know the fraction of these nuclei that are active or how much their activity varies, which are fundamental issues if we hope to understand the growth of these black holes and their effects upon their host galaxies.

Ideally, the OAN at Sierra de San Pedro Mártir should also include more general instrumentation. It’s simply not feasible to study everything through problem-specific facilities, unless there are many of them, and even the problems they address would benefit from finer-grained studies of well-defined samples. Such projects will likely require a well-instrumented telescope of four to eight meters in diameter, not so much to study especially faint or distant specimens, but to study them in exquisite detail with complementary instrumentation. Nature is complex and this is most easily revealed through very detailed studies.

In the foregoing, the telescopes and instrumentation are what first come to mind because they’re the technological challenges. However, the human factor has always been critical, both onsite and in local and national companies. The OAN has a long history as an incubator for many technologies that are now commonplace nationally. Undoubtedly this will continue.

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