A new milestone for PFS was reached in late March 2023 when the first Near-Infrared (NIR) camera was successfully delivered from Johns Hopkins University and installed at Subaru telescope. As its name suggests, this camera covers the NIR spectral band of the spectrographs (940-1260nm), in addition to the blue and red cameras. In total 4 NIR cameras will be delivered to Subaru telescope and installed on each 4 spectrograph module.
The NIR camera was developed, built and tested by a consortium composed of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM, France) and its industrial partner Bertin Winlight, Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and Princeton university (PU).
The first NIR camera was installed on the spectrograph module #1, joining the blue and red cameras already installed in December 2019, thus completing this first module. The installation at the summit was done by the PFS team at Subaru telescope, with remote assistance from LAM, JHU and PU.
About a week later, the NIR camera was successfully pumped down and cooled down at operational temperature (-168 degree Celcius), and was ready to take calibration data. The first light of this camera is expected in April 2023, during the next engineering observation run of PFS, scheduled from April 19 to May 2.
