Prime Focus Instrument has arrived at Subaru Telescope

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Time flies and a half of 2021 has already passed. Earlier this year, the first fiber cable unit and the miniature telescope for night sky study “SuNSS” was installed on Subaru telescope. In this article, we report a big news of our project. Finally the Prime Focus Instrument has delivered from Taiwan to Subaru Telescope in June 2021!!

Prime Focus Instrument (PFI) is, as named, an instrument installed on the prime focus of Subaru Telescope. PFI consists of 2400 fibers and their positioners covering ~1.25 deg^2 field of view. PFI also has 6 guiding cameras, 3 control boxes, and so on. Integration of PFI has been carried out by ASIAA (Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics) and their partner institute ASRD of CSIST (Aeronautical Systems Research Division of Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology). They has assembled and tested PFI components some of the which were delivered from Caltech, NASA/JPL, Princeton University, and Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica (LNA), Brazil.


ASIAA and ASRD colleagues integrating PFI

All integration activity finished in May 2021, and pre-ship review was held on 14 May online. As a result, the PFI team successfully passed the review, and PFI has delivered to Subaru in June 2021.

After delivery, we are re-integrating and testing PFI. We checked instrument health and basic functionality. To test the instrument such as fiber positioner performance under the operational environment, a special cleanbooth was build in the dome building, where PFI are located now. We are also integrating PFI software to our summit operation system. Later this year, we’ll test PFI connecting with Wide Field Corrector Lens, and Subaru telescope, and proceed to the system commissioning by integrating with the first Spectrograph module, the first fiber cable unit and Metrology Camera which has been already delivered and installed.

PFI under the test in the Subaru dome building