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 »

Metrology Camera is at Subaru Telescope Now!

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About one month has passed since Metrology Camera was shipped from Taiwan. Now it has arrived at Subaru Telescope at Maunakea in Hawaii. After shipping, from 23 April 2018, members from Academia Sinica, Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) visited to Hawaii Observatory of National Astronomical Observatory of Japan for final development. At Hilo base, ASIAA inspected Metrology Camera and… Read more »

Updates about Spectrograph Development

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It has been about 3 months since the first blue camera cryostat was shipped to France. In this post, we are showing the updates on development of the Spectrograph systems. At Laboratorie d’Astorophysique de Marseille (LAM), we finished the performance test using only a red camera unit, and started fully integrating the first spectrograph module (called SM1). We have already… Read more »

Metrology Camera left Taiwan to Hawaii

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One of the PFS instrument “Metrology Camera” was finally shipped from Taiwan to Hawaii!! Metrology Camera  is an instrument used to measure the fibers position while we configure fibers to target objects. Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) in Taiwan has the responsibility for Metrology Camera development, and they tested its performances before shipping in the last a… Read more »

Database prototype was opened to PFS collaboration

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Written by Masayuki Tanaka (NAOJ) PFS survey is going to collect a huge amount of data.  Thanks to the high multiplexity with 2400 fibers, we are going to collect as many as 67,000 spectra in a single night according to the current survey plan.  In addition, we will measure a variety of physical parameters  — redshifts of galaxies, strengths of emission and absorption… Read more »

Updates on Development of Metrology Camera System

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“Metrology Camera System” is one of the PFS instrument subsystems under development by ASIAA (Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taiwan). This is a small telescope system installed onto the Cassegrain Focus at the bottom of the Subaru telescope to look up the Prime focus, take the image of approximately 2400 back-illuminated fiber spots in one exposure with the large… Read more »

The 1st blue camera cryostat was delivered in Marseille

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In January 2018, the visible-blue camera cryostat of the first spectrograph module was shipped from Johns Hopkins University (JHU, the United States of America) to Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM, France). Visible-blue camera at Johns Hopkins University PFS are developing the four identical spectrograph modules, each of which has three channels with visible-blue, visible-red and near-infrared camera units, in order to… Read more »

Joint work for shipping the first positioner module

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At California Institute of Technology (Caltech,  USA), the fiber positioners “Cobra” are assembled into a module (so-called “Cobra module”) by the teams from Caltech, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Brazil in collaboration. As highlighted in the previous article, the first Cobra module has been assembled, tested and calibrated,  so will be shipped soon to Taiwan, where the Cobra modules will… Read more »

9th PFS Collaboration Meeting

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From 27 November to 1 December 2017 was held the 9th PFS collaboration meeting at Kavli IPMU, the University of Tokyo, in Kashiwa city, Japan. More and more participants have joined to the meeting, and this year about 130 collaborators gathered to the meeting. On 28 and 29 November, we had the joint sessions and shared the project updates. The… Read more »