The PFS project has reached a major milestone toward completing the instrument. PFS has four identical spectrograph modules in order to observe about 2400 astronomical objects. Among them, various modules for the first spectrograph are coming to a clean room at
Marseille Observatory (LAM) in France from our team over the world.
(delivery of modules)
Below are the pictures of the modules; the optical bench to mount a bunch of parts for the Spectrograph very precisely, and the visual camera cryostat module temporarily placed.
(optical bench)
(camera cryostat module)
From August through November, additional camera parts, for the detector, will be delivered from the collaborator in East Coast in the States. Slit module with several hundred fibers will also be delivered soon from LNA, Brazil.
In the next year, at LAM, we will integrate these modules from multi places over the world, confirming that the required performance is achieved. The movie (here) below shows the process of the integration of the camera module.
From the point of view of the whole project, we have come to the starting point of production of the instrument. Stepping into a worthwhile phase, where the designed parts are made up actually, we all intend to have a great effort on achieving a desired performance.
