2nd On-Telescope Test of Metrology Camera System

      Comments Off on 2nd On-Telescope Test of Metrology Camera System

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

      Comments Off on Second phase of fiber cable integration started in Brazil

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

      Comments Off on 5 “Cobra Modules” left from California to Taiwan

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

      No Comments on 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 »

On-telescope Test of the Metrology Camera System

      Comments Off on On-telescope Test of the Metrology Camera System

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

      No Comments on PFS Science Working Group Meeting at Princeton University

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

      No Comments on The prototype fiber cable has been installed on the telescope

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

      Comments Off on Fiber slit test done for the first spectrograph module

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…

      Comments Off on After the arrival of metrology camera at the Subaru telescope…

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 »