Author Archives: PFS Project

Obituary: Olivier Le Fèvre

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Prof. Olivier Le Fèvre passed away on June 25, 2020 at the age of 59. He had been fighting brain cancer with courage and lucidity for the past 2 and a half years. Prof. Le Fèvre was the key person to get the PFS project off the ground, bringing Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille as a full partner of the collaboration…. Read more »

All fiber positioner modules were shipped

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It was April 2018 that the first fiber module was shipped from Caltech, US to Taiwan. Two years later, now we have completed delivering all the modules to Taiwan. PFS is an instrument to observe celestial objects using optical fibers. Actuators nicknamed “Cobras” are used to position fibers to the targets, and “Cobra” modules consisting of the “Cobras” and fibers… Read more »

Assemble of the first Near-Infrared Camera Unit

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The topic of this post is the development of the Near-Infrared Camera Units at Johns Hopkins University. Each Spectrograph module of the PFS project equips three cameras — visible-blue, visible-red and near-infrared — to take spectra whose wavelength ranges from 380 nm to 1260 nm with a single shot. Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and Princeton University (PU) in the United… Read more »

News about Integration Activity of Prime Focus Instrument

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PFS instruments are being developed all over the world. In this post, we are featuring the integration activities of Prime Focus Instrument in Taiwan. Prime Focus Instrument (PFI) is the instrument literally installed to the prime focus of the Subaru Telescope, and consists of fiber positioner modules, guiding cameras and so on. Each fiber is attached with 2-axis actuator named… Read more »

News from Integration Work of Fiber Cable

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A few month ago, we reported that we had entered on the second phase of the fiber cable integration (see this). This time we are going to show news since then. PFS catches the light of stars and galaxies by fibers installed on the prime focal plane at the top of Subaru Telescope, and obtains their spectra with the spectrograph… Read more »

11th PFS collaboration meeting at Caltech

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The annual PFS collaboration meeting was held from 9 to 13 December 2019 at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Here is a brief report by a young researcher who participated in the meeting. The collaboration meeting is a good opportunity for us to exchange scientific ideas. It is important to learn the status of instrumentation and scientific goals/objectives from other… Read more »

The first Spectrograph Module was re-assembled at Subaru Telescope

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Earlier we reported that one of the PFS instruments, the first Spectrograph Module was shipped to Hawaii Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Hawaii (see here). More recently, the module has been transported to Subaru Telescope at the summit of Maunakea, and re-assembled there. PFS Spectrograph Module consists of ten and several assemblies such as camera units, grating assemblies,… Read more »

PFS Science Meeting at Columbia University

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PFS Science Meeting was held at Columbia University in New York, USA from October 4 to 7, 2019. PFS Science Team conducts a meeting in which we intensively discuss what kind of observations should be made in the large survey observation using PFS about once a year (see our post for the last year’s meeting). In this meeting, technical topics… Read more »

The first Spectrograph Module is heading to Subaru

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In October 2019, one of the PFS instrument subsystems, the first Spectrograph Module was shipped to Hawaii Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. We obtain about 2400 spectra with four Spectrograph Modules. The Spectrograph Modules are being developed by Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM, France), Johns Hopkins University (the USA), Princeton University (the USA) and Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica (Brazil). Since… Read more »

2nd On-Telescope Test of Metrology Camera System

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Last year Metrology Camera System (MCS) was shipped to Subaru Telescope of National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, in Hawaii. After onsite integration and test, we installed MCS to the telescope and carried out optical alignment and on-telescope performance tests in June and October 2018. (See this for details)  MCS is installed to the Cassegrain focus at the bottom of the… Read more »