for Gemini North. The timeline is less certain,
but we would expect to have the laser on sky
sometime in 2018.
Coming Soon: Gemini
Instrument Upgrade Projects —
Request for Proposals
Gemini Observatory is planning to invite the
community to participate in the 2016 Request for Proposals (RfP) for Instrument Upgrades. This initiative aims to establish annual proposal calls for science-driven upgrades
to Gemini’s facility instruments, including
projects that may rely upon in-kind contributions or telescope time as compensation.
This year, Gemini will provide a total budget
of 600,000 USD to fund one or more projects. The available budget was developed to
fund one small (~100,000 USD) and one medium (~500,000 USD) upgrades, but we are
open to the distribution of funds from 0 to
the 600,000 USD total available budget.
After the start of the project, the team
completed the design of the filters and
finished the specifications in collaboration
with Gemini’s F-2 team. A TAMU subcontract is now making filters and planning
the quality check tests the team will execute in both the laboratory and the Gemini
telescope. The aim is to make this new capability available to the community in the
second quarter of 2017, enabling a wide
range of potential science from detecting
young stellar object candidates in deeply
obscured star-forming regions, to deep Kband imaging to study the demography of
high-redshift massive galaxies.
To encourage a wide variety of participant
organizations in this opportunity, Gemini
will provide up to one night (10 hours) of
observing time per project to be used on
demonstrating the scientific potential of
the upgraded instrument. The RfP will be released by or in October 2016 and will remain
open through the end of the year. Further
information and updates can be found here.
In the 2015 RfP, the total budget was 100,000
USD and the award went to Casey Papovich
and his team from Texas A&M University and
astronomers from the University of Toronto,
Swinburne University of Technology, Leiden
University, and Macquaire University. The
project will upgrade the near-Infrared widefield imager and multi-object spectrometer
FLAMINGOS-2 (F-2) with two medium-band
filters designed to split the 1.9-2.5 micron
spectral range for sensitive imaging surveys
of very red objects.
October 2016
GeminiFocus
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