Figure 1.
In August, the
OCTOCAM team met
at Gemini North in
Hilo, Hawai‘i, for the
instrument’s Conceptual
Design Review.
(AAO Project Manager
Gabriella Baker, is not
pictured.)
OCTOCAM Meetings Lead to
Forward Progress
After a successful kickoff meeting in April,
the OCTOCAM team worked with Gemini
staff to establish a better understanding of
Gemini operations and how the new instru-
ment (an 8-channel imager and spectro-
graph) would be successfully integrated. The
teams came together again in early August
for the Conceptual Design Review in Hilo,
Hawai‘i (Figure 1).
Pete Roaming (Project Manager for South-
west Research Institute) and Christina Thöne
(Deputy Project Manager from the Institute
of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain) led the
presentations on work accomplished during
the project’s first four months. An external
review panel chaired by John Troeltzsch
from Ball Aerospace reviewed the required
documents and led a discussion of progress
thus far.
The OCTOCAM team benefited from a sum-
mit tour to familiarize themselves with the
telescope’s physical structure, Acquisition
and Guidance unit, and space envelope. A
panel report was submitted to Scot Klein-
man (Gemini’s Associate Director of Devel-
16
GeminiFocus
opment) to be incorporated into recommen-
dations to the team as they advance to the
preliminary design stage.
— Catherine Blough
GHOST Takes Shape
The Gemini High-resolution Optical SpecTro-
graph (GHOST) — the joint project between
Gemini, Australian Astronomical Observa-
tory (AAO), National Research Council Can-
ada-Herzberg (NRC-H), and the Australian
National University (ANU) — has made good
progress over the past few months. In May
we held a team meeting in Sydney, Austra-
lia, with members from all four institutions
to plan the project’s test phase and work
through other outstanding project issues.
GHOST begins verification and testing over
the next several months. AAO is completing
the build phase of its work on the instru-
ment’s Cassegrain unit (Figure 2) and sci-
ence optical cable. The ANU has completed
70% of the instrument control software and
is finishing the last lines of code needed for
the upcoming testing. The GHOST data re-
duction software, also being developed at
ANU, is also progressing well.
October 2017