Figure 10.
Scott Roberts of HAA
showing Telescope
Scientist Tom Hayward
of Gemini the impressive
outer enclosure for
GHOST.
Credit: Scot Kleinman
Figure 11.
The MAROON-X
instrument team and
Gemini staff pose with
the instrument, installed
on Gemini North on
September 23rd, and
ready for first light.
Although the Front
End was successfully
commissioned in
December, now if you
look closely, you can
see the optical fiber
that runs down to the
spectrograph in the
Gemini North Pier Lab
below. Left to right: Paul
McBride, John Randrup,
Rody Kawaihae, Harlan
Uehara, Eduardo Tapia
(all Gemini staff),
Andreas Seifahrt,
David Kaspar, Julian
Stuermer (all University
of Chicago), and Alison
Peck and John White
(both Gemini staff).
be a low-cost low-risk
design using a single
HAWAII-4RG detector,
and intend for GNAO
to provide a 2-arc-
minute field of view
with a Strehl ratio
of no less than 30%
over the entire field
of view under median
seeing conditions in K
band. A Request for Proposals to design this
imager has been released and is available on
the Gemini website here.
MAROON-X Deployed at
Gemini North
MAROON-X, a new visiting high-resolution
spectrograph at Gemini North (Figure 11),
will be available to users in 2020. Construct-
ed at the University of Chicago, MAROON-X
is expected to be able to detect Earth-size
planets in the habitable zones of mid- to
late-M dwarfs using the radial velocity de-
tection method.
The important wavelength range for the
instrument is 700-900 nanometers and the
resolving power approximately 80,000. To
achieve this precision the instrument must
be intrinsically stable and the optical setup
fixed, so the entire instrument has been
GIRMOS Conceptual Design
Review a Success
The Gemini InfraRed Multi-Object Spectro-
graph (GIRMOS) is a powerful new visiting
instrument being designed and built for the
Gemini telescope by a Canadian consortium
of universities led by the University of Toron-
to and HAA. This instrument will overcome
a key limitation in existing adaptive optics
(AO) facilities; where exisitng integral field
spectrographs are designed to observe only
single objects with adequate atmospheric
correction, GIRMOS is being designed to
have the ability to observe multiple sources
simultaneously with high spatial resolution
while obtaining spectra at the same time
(Sivanandam et al., 2018).
GIRMOS accomplishes this by tak-
ing advantage of the latest develop-
ments in multi-object AO (MOAO)
and integral field spectroscopy. It
exploits the AO correction from both
a telescope-based AO system (either
GeMS or the prospective Gemini
North AO system) and its own addi-
tional MOAO system that feeds mul-
tiple 1- to 2.4- micron integral field
spectrographs (R = ~3,000 and 8,000)
that can each observe an object in-
dependently within a 2-arcminute
field of view.
Credit: Julian Stuermer
54
placed in a vacuum tank in a thermally sta-
ble enclosure, which the instrument team
assembled in the Gemini North Pier Lab,
four levels below the telescope. After a year
of monitoring the temperature stability in
the enclosure, commissioning the Front End
(which mounts on the Instrument Support
Structure and holds the optical fiber posi-
tioner), and integrating the spectrograph
itself in the Gemini North Pier Lab, the team
has begun commissioning. See a press re-
lease about MAROON-X available from the
University of Chicago.
GeminiFocus
January 2020 / 2019 Year in Review