Speaker
Description
With the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ESO's ELT) construction just a few years away from completion, the community is preparing to observe with the world’s biggest eye on the sky later this decade. However, the natural question that emerges now is “what comes next?”. Taking into account that the conception, development and construction of a project of the scale of e.g. the ELT takes several decades, ESO started the Expanding Horizons process, with which the Organisation will search for its next innovative ground-based programme to start operations in the 2040s. Expanding Horizons is an open and inclusive call to all of ESO’s community. The goal of this process is to trigger dialogue about astronomy challenges and disruptive technologies in the 2040s and ultimately to identify the next transformational facility that will advance humanity’s understanding of the Universe, whilst fostering international collaboration.
In this talk I will give an overview of the currently ongoing communications campaign on Expanding Horizons, whose goals are on one side to incentivise the astronomy community to take an active part in shaping the next ESO programme, while on the other side to rise awareness among the various stakeholders such as policy and decision makers, technology and innovation experts. I will also discuss the various challenges, such as rising awareness of a facility that is still a long way from starting operations and the involvement of smaller and traditionally underrepresented communities.
