A path of growth for Argentine Geodesy

Abstract

A National Geodesy Program is proposed which, with a smaller investment than the one the country makes in large instruments, will contribute to maximizing the benefit that Argentina extracts from them. The premise is that the Argentine instruments strengthen the global geodetic infrastructure in one of the world's most needy regions and are intensively exploited by the international community, but their use in the country is still limited due to the lack of inter-institutional coordination and the lack of Have enough specialized HR.
In recent years, state-of-the-art instruments have been installed that have made the country the best equipped in the region: three multi-technical observatories dedicated 100% to Geodesy, the German Argentine Geodesy Observatory (AGGO), the Observatory. Astronomical. Félix Aguilar (OAFA) and the Rio Grande Astronomical Station (EARG) and very sophisticated instruments partially dedicated to this discipline, the Chinese Argentine Radio Telescope (CART), the ESA Deep Space 3 station (ESA–DS3) and (CALTC). The facilities work in partnership with foreign institutions that provide the instruments, but the Argentine investment accumulated over time is as great or greater than the foreign one.
This has transformed Argentina into an example of compliance with the 2015 UN resolution, entitled "A Global Geodetic Reference Framework for Sustainable Development". It aims to face a variety of global problems whose approach requires the use of very sophisticated artificial satellites (change in sea level, terrestrial water cycle, geological risks, extreme weather events and climate change, ecosystem dynamics). The operation of these satellites requires improvements in the Global Geodetic Reference Frame that cannot be achieved by adding instruments in the most developed countries. On the contrary, it is necessary to add them in those that lack them, especially in the southern hemisphere.
The UN requirement falls on Geodesy and facing it implies the maintenance of international scientific services and the carrying out of very long-term works. This reduces the possibility of frequently publishing in high-impact journals and makes the conventional bibliometric indicators of the scientists who approach them grow relatively slowly. But this does not mean that such work lacks scientific hierarchy or that those who carry it out have little creativity. They are long-term works that arouse the interest of certain scientists, but not of those whose vocation is the rapid and frequent generation of new knowledge. Conventional bibliometric indicators, which are adequate to measure certain qualities, hinder the development of human resources that the country needs to take better advantage of its large investment in geodetic instruments.
A multi-institutional program of national scope with the objectives of strategically coordinating and for the benefit of the country the use of its extraordinary geodetic infrastructure and generating innovative training spaces and improving the endowment and sustainability of HR, will allow a significant increase in the Argentine scientific value added to the data your instruments produce.
Item (1) of this document describes the existing geodetic infrastructure in the country; in (2) the reasons that justify the Argentine investment in these instruments and those that would justify the implementation of this program are exposed; and in (3) some preliminary ideas about its implementation are formulated.