News from Integration Work of Fiber Cable

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

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

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 »

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 »

5 “Cobra Modules” left from California to Taiwan

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Among the PFS instruments, “Cobra” modules position fibers to galaxies and stars on the Subaru Prime Focal plane. 42 Cobra modules, each of which consists of 57 fibers and its positioners, cover the entire PFS field of view without any inaccessible gaps as shown in Figure 1. Two groups are collaborating to assemble “Cobra Modules”; Brazilian team responsible for fibers,… Read more »

10th PFS Collaboration Meeting

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 »