The entire MSE partnership welcomes MSE:UK as Observers!

It is with great pleasure that we announce that a consortium of institutions from the UK has joined the MSE Management Group (MG) as Observers. The consortium is led from the UK Astronomy Technology Center (UKATC) in Edinburgh, part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), and includes the University of Cambridge, the University of Durham, University College London and the University of Oxford. They join on the Management Group, Full Member representatives from Australia, Canada, China, France, Hawaii, and India, and Observer representatives from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in the US and Texas A&M University.

“We’re very excited to be joining MSE as Observers at this stage in the project”, said Ruben Sanchez-Janssen, from the UKATC and the MG representative for MSE:UK. “The science for MSE is amazing and a great fit to the UK community, where we have not just the astronomers but also the technical skills to make a big impact on the Observatory. We will be using the next few months to better understand how best we can join with the rest of MSE to take the Observatory through design and build so we can all get started on the science.”

MSE Project Spokesperson Alan McConnachie commented “Its tremendous to welcome our friends from the UK into the MSE collaboration. UK astronomers have been a core contingent of the MSE science team for several years, and its great to see the community getting together to make sure that UK astronomers will be using MSE and sharing in the science at first light.”

MSE:UK will be represented on the MSE Science Advisory Group by Aprajita Verma (Oxford). The MSE:UK working group will act as the point of contact between MSE and the broader UK community. Representatives from each institution include Nic Walton (Cambridge), Graham Murray (Durham), Gavin Dalton (Oxford/RAL) and Peter Doel (UCL).