Secrets of the Hoary Deep: A Personal History of Modern Astronomy

SIXTEEN: The European Southern Observatory

SIXTEEN Joining ESO—Fusing ESO into a Coherent Whole— Personnel Issues: Overhauling the System—Shaping Up: The La Silla Observatory— Catching Up: CCD Detector Development—Transforming Data Management at ESO— War and Peace: Relations between Chile and ESO The European Southern Observatory 276 Joining ESO The European Southern Observatory is an intergovernmental European research organization for astronomy in the southern hemisphere. It was created by international treaty in 1962, is governed by a council composed of representatives of the governments of the member states, and is funded by these states, normally through their foreign ministries. Currently the member states are Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany , Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. More countries are expected to join in the next few years. The ESO headquarters is in Garching, near Munich, Germany; its observing stations, located in Chile, include the VLT at Cerro Paranal (the largest array in the world) and several medium-sized telescopes at La Silla. Currently ESO is developing, jointly with North America and Japan, the Atacama Large MillimeterArray(ALMA)atLlanodeChajnantorintheAtacamaDesert,Chile. Prior to my accepting the position of director general of the organization, I was given the opportunity in 1992 to visit ESO’s offices and residence in Santiago, the La Silla Observatory, and Cerro Paranal. Harry van der Laan, my predecessor, was my gracious host in Munich, and Daniel Hofstadt, the director of La Silla, squired me around Chile on the chartered ESO plane. Harry was understandably saddened by the decision of the council not to renew his appointment, as he felt he had done his very best for ESO. He published a farewell article in The Messenger, a widely circulated ESO quarterly journal.1 Dutch astronomers have had a long relationship with ESO; the very concept of a European astronomical organization arose through discussions at Leiden in 1953 between Jan Oort and Walter Baade. The long stewardship of ESO by Lodewijk Woltjer resulted in the construction of the New Technology Telescope (NTT) and the studies that led to the ESO Council ’s approval of the VLT project. Harry himself had initiated the VLT project in 1988. In his farewell message,Harry mentioned the two basic ideas that inspired him during his tenure that are still valid today: ESO’s function is to serve the European astronomical community, and the community must be given the opportunity to participate not only through use of the facilities and by providing scientific guidance, but also through instrument development and construction. These ideas I completely share. ESO was confronted at the beginning of the VLT program by several daunting challenges. Although the organization had been successful in developing the NTT at La Silla in the 1980s, this instrument was very different in scale and technical challenges from theVLT; its cost was about $15 million, or about one-third the ESO budget at the time, and it was fully funded at the start as an add-on to the normal expenditures. VLT, on the other hand, represented at least six times the organization’s yearly budget, and because the funding was approved on a yearly basis, management of the cash flow became an important issue. In addition, NTT was not as radical a technical departure from established practice as VLT, even though it provided a test of some of the concepts that were later fully developed in VLT. The construction and operation of the La Silla Observatory and the development of NTT had created an extremely competent scientific and technical staff, but they had not resulted in an organizational structure suitable for leading a project of the magnitude of the VLT. The situation became quite clear to me as I visited ESO headquarters and the sites in Chile in the summer of 1992. In discussions with many of the scientists and managers, I found an organization that was not unified through communication or a shared vision. The operations in Chile seemed disEuropean Southern Observatory 277 connected from headquarters and did not benefit from the scientific and technical competence available there. The lines of authority were clear only in that everybody reported to the director general, but there were no unambiguous statements of tasks or assignment of responsibility at the project level. There was little hands-on management at the senior levels of the organization , where an old-fashioned and rather paternalistic approach had developed early...