Author Archives: PFS Project

Engineering First Light!!

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We are going to show the second milestone we achieved this month in this article.At last, we succeeded in taking stars spectra during the recent Engineering observation. That is, we achieved the engineering first light! We PFS project have carried out the on-telescope tests since Metrology Camera System was delivered to Subaru Telescope in 2018. In particular, we started engineering… Read more »

The first near-infrared camera has arrived at LAM!

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We PFS project reached many milestones in September 2022. We are going to report them in the coming articles. First of all, finally, the first near-infrared camera has been shipped from Johns Hopkins University (JHU, USA) to Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM, France)!! PFS Spectrograph equips three cameras, two visible cameras (blue and red) and one near-infrared camera, and takes… Read more »

Richard Ellis won Royal Medal!

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Prof. Richard Ellis, who leads the PFS science team, won 2022 Royal Medal of the Royal Society in UK. https://royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/awards/royal-medal/ Royal Medal started in 1825. Each year, the Royal Society awards three persons; the two persons who did the most important contribution to advance natural knowledge of physics and biology, respectively, and one person who significantly contributed to applied science…. Read more »

PFS presentations at the international conference SPIE

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There was an international conference called “SPIE 2022 Astronomical telescope + Instrumentation” from 17 to 22 July 2022 in Montreal, Canada. People working for research institutes and companies in the world which relate with the telescope and astronomical instruments participate in this meeting, and exchange information and do networking. SPIE conference is held every other year. The last one (in… Read more »

The second fiber cable system is now on the Subaru telescope!

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As we reported in the previous article, the second fiber cable system was standing by in Hilo, Hawaii, for its installation to the Subaru telescope. Thanks to the schedule arrangement by the observatory, we had a 2-week slot in April to install and test the second fiber cable system. We are going to report the installation and test activities in… Read more »

13th PFS collaboration meeting

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Since the project launched, we have had collaboration meetings rather annually. We had the 13th collaboration meeting from 22nd to 24th March 2022. Due to the COVID situation, we meeting was held online using the platforms Zoom and Gather Town as we did in the last year. As PFS participant institutes are from all over the world, the meeting time,… Read more »

Hitoshi Murayama was elected as honored AAAS fellow!

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We got an exciting news — our PI, professor Hitoshi Murayama was elected as a fellow of AAAS, American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2021!! AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society to advance science, engineering and innovation for the benefit of all people all over the world. AAAS is the publisher of famous journal “Science”. Every… Read more »

The second fiber cable unit has arrived in Hawaii

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Happy new year! The first article in 2022 is about the subsystem delivered to Subaru telescope a while ago. In October 2021, the second fiber cable unit was shipped to Subaru telescope. PFS fiber cable system is ~55m cable connecting Prime Focus Instrument on the top of the Subaru telescope and Spectrograph System on 4th floor in the dome building…. Read more »

Engineering Observation in November 2021

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Two months after on-telescope test by integrating subsystems, we had another engineering observation (engineering run) on three nights in November 2021. In this article, we’re going to tell a story about our work around the engineering nights. Although we made big progresses in fiber configuration etc. during the September run, we also found a couple of major issues on Prime… Read more »

The first on-telescope test integrating all the delivered subsystems

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We PFS project met a big milestone in September 2021. We finally carried out on-telescope test integrating the subsystems Prime Focus Instrument, Spectrograph Module 1, Fiber Cable System 1, and Metrology Camera System!! PFS instrument consists of four major subsystems: Prime Focus Instrument (PFI) on the prime focus of Subaru Telescope, Metrology Camera System (MCS) on Cassegrain Focus, four identical… Read more »