The primary accomplishment of 2013 was
the successful production of a complete
200-meter-long test fiber that met all the
project requirements. The fiber is GRACES’s
most critical component. As the article goes
to press, the vendor (FiberTech) has completed one of the two needed full-length
science fibers with initial testing that appears promising. The final 270-meter-long
optical fiber cable, with its two individual
shielded fibers, is expected to be completed and sent to NRC-Herzberg (formerly the
Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics) in January, 2014. In order to compete with other
similar 8- to 10-meter class instruments, the
fiber must achieve its specified high performance in term of its focal-ratio degradation
(FRD), internal transmission, and spectral
range coverage.
The successful 200-meter test fiber was a
milestone event toward achieving the required FRD within the 270-meter-long science cable of ~10 percent (required) to ~20
percent (goal); the test cable was fabricated,
polished, shielded, and had connectors attached before it was tested and delivered in
July. All of the optics (e.g., lenses and slicer)
and commercial hardware (e.g., translation
stages, adjusters, and mounts) have been
received, and the custom hardware parts
have been fabricated, many of them in the
machine shop at NRC-Herzberg.
The injector unit uses a Gemini North MultiObject Spectrograph (GMOS-N) filter cassette,
which allows GMOS-N to act as an acquisition
camera for GRACES. Permanently installed in
ESPaDOnS, the slicer (see Figure 6) includes a
deployable fold mirror that allows ESPaDOnS
to be used with the CFHT or GRACES by simply moving the fold mirror in and out of the
optical path of ESPaDOnS. Critically, this swap
can be done without affecting the alignment
or performance of either instrument.
January2014
Looking Ahead to 2014
Figure 6.
Our plans for 2014 are to see a completely
revitalized instrument suite at Gemini South
with GeMS/GSAOI, GPI, and FLAMINGOS-2 in
regular operations and new state-of-the-artdetectors in GMOS-S. We expect to complete
the preliminary design stage of GHOS and
launch a request for proposals for the nextgeneration, new Gemini instrument in 2014.
We plan to be testing GRACES during the
second quarter of 2014 and, if successful,
will work to offer high-resolution optical
spectroscopy to our community with this instrument. In the lab, we will start assembly
of a new focal plane array for GMOS-N, to be
installed in early 2015.
The slicer bench,
which will be installed
inside ESPaDOnS, will
receive light from the
fiber and send it to
the image slicer (not
yet installed on the
bench). The sliced
image is then directed
to the ESPaDOnS
spectrograph.
Scot Kleinman is Head of the Instrumentation
Program at Gemini. He can be reached at:
[email protected]
GeminiFocus
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