From 26 June to 1 July, there was a conference titled “SPIE Astronomical telescopes and instrumentation” in Edinburgh, UK. This is a pretty big international event organized every two years where engineers and scientists from many countries over the world get together to report and discuss activities and progress against challenges in projects, research, and development of various sizes and time scales.
The PFS project submitted eight contributions: One oral presentation by the project manager Naoyuki Tamura gave a project overview, recent progress and future plans, and the seven posters presented the current status and progress of the individual subsystems and subcomponents development in detail. Besides, the PI Hitoshi Murayama gave a plenary talk where the SuMIRe project on the Subaru Telescope was emphasized: The large sky survey in both imaging (on-going with HSC) and spectroscopy (with PFS in the near future) will deliver a unprecedented powerful data set to address the fundamental questions of the Universe such as the origins of dark matter and dark energy and the fate of the Universe.
In fact, this conference is also a valuable opportunity for the multi-national PFS team to meet together face-to-face, so we took the full advantage of this and had several meetings to share the current status and issues and intensively discuss plans forward.
See also the post about PFS science.
