Search

SALT is a 10-m class optical telescope located in Sutherland, South Africa, owned by an international consortium and operated in fully queue-scheduled mode by the South African Astronomical Observatory. Since the start of its science operations in late 2011 and particularly since the start of its integrated operations, all the key metrics have continued to increase at a significant pace, breaking records nearly every semester: program completion, completion levels per priority, number of observed blocks, and publications. In this paper we present an update of all of our performance metrics and the strategic changes that have been and are taking place, in line with the new Strategic Plan for SALT and the SAAO.

To take full advantage of the upcoming era of LSST, time-domain astronomy, and proposals that span multiple semesters and may have hundreds of targets, it was decided to upgrade the software for the Southern African Large Telescope. At the heart of the upgrade were changes to the MySQL database. A new web-based API allows an automated submission of targets of opportunities. This API is also used by a React-based single page application for real time updates of time allocations. The software upgrade also includes extensible web pages for monitoring data quality.

The South African astronomical community together with the international SALT community recently completed a process to detail a science strategy for SALT, the 10m international telescope that SAAO operates. After six years of science operations, the telescope is a very cost-effective large telescope science producer. The strategy was adopted by the SALT Board, and has already resulted in funding choices for the next stage of instrumentation. The SALT strategy intertwines with that of the SAAO and South African optical astronomy in general. This paper outlines the process followed, the main motivations and plans for the next stage, including risks and challenges. This paper in particular concentrates on the plans to making SAAO/SALT a major player in time domain astrophysics, one of three adopted strategic science focus areas. Plans include a novel design for a high-efficiency spectrograph serving transient follow-up, for which South Africa is well positioned; advanced software aiming to make the whole mountain-top operate as a single transient machine; feasibility studies into revolutionizing SALT observations by utilizing the primary mirror's hundreds of square degree size uncorrected field-of-view. Other SPIE papers in this meeting describe these and other developments at SALT and SAAO in more detail