All the projects with which Astronomy Australia Ltd is currently involved are part of the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) for radio and optical astronomy. The astronomy NCRIS includes a forty-five million dollar grant from the Australian Government announced in November 2006.

In its decadal plan published in November 2005, the National Committee for Astronomy called for the creation of a new body to co-ordinate issues of national astronomy infrastructure. The astronomy NCRIS has acted as a catalyst for the creation of such a new body, incorporated as Astronomy Australia Ltd.

The astronomy NCRIS runs until June 2011, and aims to deliver facilities for Australian astronomers to use now, while also investing in the next generation of facilities. The projects are:

Project

Lead participant

NCRIS

AAL contact
AAT upgrade and instrument Anglo-Australian Observatory $10.0M Prof Brian Schmidt
ASKAP CSIRO $14.6M Prof Elaine Sadler
Gemini Australian Research Council $10.9M Prof Warrick couch
GMT DDP year 1 Australian National University $1.4M Prof Warrick Couch
MWA University of Melbourne $4.6M Prof Lister Staveley-Smith
PILOT Design Study University of New South Wales $1.0M Dr Martin Cole

Some of the NCRIS grant is also held in a strategic reserve, and approximately 2.5% is used for the running of Astronomy Australia Ltd.

Once the contracts for the above projects have been finalised, the details of the projects will be published on the accompanying project pages.