NRAO/GBO update - Tues Dec 1st
The North American NRAO/GBO instruments/support systems are online and performing well. In Chile, ALMA continues its progress on the road to restart.
Firstly, a piece of sad news – the Arecibo telescope finally collapsed last night. The cables supporting the observing platform yielded, and it fell into the dish. Thankfully, nobody was injured. Our thoughts go out to our Arecibo colleagues. More news stories and pictures can be expected later today. An obvious question is: what assistance can we provide to Arecibo Observatory and the science community moving forward? There may be opportunities for GBT and JVLA to assist with efforts like completing student projects, etc. identified in the near future.
COVID life continues. Local/regional infection rates remain high in NM and WV; VA and Chile are lower, but still rising. I am pleased to report that a major potential event at the VLA site a few weeks ago (where an asymptomatic employee worked alongside more than two dozen coworkers for a few days before feeling sick, testing positive) resulted in no additional infections – no lateral spread in the workplace. Everyone involved did a great job following our safety processes, and the employee/family are doing well. This is the second potential spreader event across the Observatories in recent months (an earlier one occurred in Green Bank), and neither resulted in spread to coworkers. Our workplace practices seem to be protecting us. There has been some good news about vaccines in the past few weeks – my guess is we may have access to these by March/April at the earliest. We have begun thinking about how we will incorporate vaccination status into our policies.
We continue to deal with several tracing cases each week. With Thanksgiving just behind us, please be particularly careful this week, and monitor your health (and members of your families/social bubbles) – if you are feeling ill, take a sick day, isolate yourself and let us know immediately. As a country, we are passing through a moment where careful monitoring and distancing is critical – same with the holiday period at the end of this month. Avoiding travel and large social events, maintaining physical distances in public, hand washing .. all still very important.
As I mentioned in my last note, we’re planning a “quiet month” from mid-December through mid-January, particularly for people routinely coming into the facilities. Please talk with your supervisor to understand the plan for your group/division/dept.
If you need COVID information or support, please contact your supervisor, Dept Head, ESS or me. The website containing all our info is: https://info.nrao.edu/covid-19. Many thanks to our Safety and Computing infrastructure teams for keeping us online. Take care of yourselves, and stay safe.
Tony Beasley
