The net result of these changes is that NFRA's core program in future will involve operating the Radio Observatory and running our Technical Laboratory. The former is expected to be financed largely from our base budget and will include support for the European VLBI Network, Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe, and the European Science Foundation's radio spectrum management secretariat. Our base budget will be reviewed by NWO in the course of next year with a view to possible revision from fiscal year 2000. In addition to the new funding for instrumental development through NOVA, several other instrumental projects have been funded recently. This project will increase the instantaneous system bandwidth to the full 160 MHz available with the new front-end receivers.
Plans are to have much of the construction work carried out in industry.
During the spring, NWO's Area Council for the Physical Sciences approved a special grant to start development of auxiliary instrumentation for Utrecht University's Dutch Open Telescope on La Palma. Plans are now to study possible instrumentation optimized for investigating the physics of convection in the solar photosphere. Upgrades to optical lab facilities were also completed to permit polishing and testing not only of metallic aluminum but also cadmium-telluride and germanium optics. The project is on course for a Final Design Review in February 1999. It has been designed and built during the past two years under the leadership of Dr. Paul van Haren at the Instrumentatie Groep Fysica of the Utrecht University.