Author Archives: PFS Project

Second phase of fiber cable integration started in Brazil

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PFS instrument delivers lights of stars and galaxies from the telescope to our spectrographs by a ~60m-long cable of optical fibers. As we presented in the previous post (https://pfs.ipmu.jp/blog/2017/04/p447), the fiber cables were assembled at the factory of PPC Broadband Inc. in UK. Then the cables were shipped to LNA in Brazil for the next step. If some stress such… Read more »

10th PFS Collaboration Meeting

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From 10th to 14th December 2018, we held 10th PFS collaboration meeting at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. Usually, individual groups for developing instruments and designing observational survey have discussions via regular video/phone meetings and  sometimes by visiting each other. This meeting, on the other hand, is the biggest for the whole collaboration to gather up for discussions. About 80… Read more »

On-telescope Test of the Metrology Camera System

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From 23rd to 25th October 2018, or 4 months after Metrology Camera System (MCS) was tested on Subaru telescope, we have finally carried out 2nd test of MCS on the Subaru telescope. Since we used the telescope at night this time, this is the first engineering run with PFS instrument! MCS is the instrument to measure the positions of the… Read more »

PFS Science Working Group Meeting at Princeton University

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The PFS Science Team has established a working group for each scientific objective and has vigorously discussed what interesting science cases are to exploit the strengths of PFS and how we optimize the survey observation accordingly (visit our past post and our official web site for more details about science objectives of the project). Based on these discussions we have developed an… Read more »

The prototype fiber cable has been installed on the telescope

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We reported that Metrology Camera System had been installed to the Subaru Telescope for the test. MCS, however, is not the only instrument for PFS to have been installed to the telescope. The prototype fiber cable was also routed on the telescope to test the optical performance about a half year ago. The work was done a little long time… Read more »

Fiber slit test done for the first spectrograph module

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In this article, we are going to show recent news at Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM, France), where the first PFS Spectrograph module is being integrated. The assemblies for the first spectrograph module, such as the visible-blue and red cameras, optical bench and optical components have been delivered to LAM, as we showed in the previous article. Since then, the fiber… Read more »

After the arrival of metrology camera at the Subaru telescope…

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Since we published the article about the delivery of the Metrology Camera System (MCS) to Subaru Telescope in May this year, the member mainly from ASIAA (Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taiwan) have visited Subaru Telescope a few times, in order to finalize the integration and proceed the on-site tests. In this article, we are going to talk… Read more »

Presence of PFS at the SPIE conference

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On June 10-15 2018, there was the SPIE conference titled “Astronomical Telescope and Instrumentation” at Austin Convention Center, in Austin, Texas, USA. This is a big international conference of astronomical instrumentation held every two years. Hundreds of presentations are given about a wide range of topics across ground-based facilities, space missions, and R&D studies. Like many other projects did so… Read more »

First “Cobra” Module is under the Test in Taiwan

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To talk about this story, one should go back in time a little … Some time ago, the Metrology Camera System was shipped over the Pacific Ocean(from Taiwan to Hawaii).  In fact, around the same time, the first fiber positioner module was also shipped over the Pacific Ocean, from California to Taiwan. The PFS instrument catches the light from galaxies and… Read more »