and technical expertise to provide similar ca-
pabilities for the next generation 30-meter-
class telescopes.
References:
Sivanandam, S., et al., 2018, Proc. SPIE, 10702,
107021J (arXiv:1807.03797)
We plan to commission GIRMOS in 2024
and expect to be well positioned to offer
GIRMOS as a workhorse survey instrument
for the Gemini community. By 2024, sev-
eral exciting projects should be underway,
including both the James Webb Space Tele-
scope and the European Space Agency’s Eu-
clid space telescope, which promise to pro-
vide exciting new bright, infrared targets for
spectroscopic follow-up. Gravitational wave
detectors such as the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory in combi-
nation with imaging follow-up will provide
well-localized gravitational wave sources.
Likewise, the Large Synoptic Survey Tele-
scope (now under construction in Chile)
and the Square Kilometre Array (to be built
in Australia and South Africa) pathfinders
will be detecting exotic transient sources;
and the current Atacama Large Millimeter
Array will be in an era of providing large,
well-characterized surveys.
With its multiplexing ability, and particular-
ly with the benefit of the newly announced
Gemini North AO system which should pro-
vide an even better corrected field, GIRMOS
at Gemini is ideally positioned to lead the
era of multi-messenger astronomy, under-
taking surveys of large samples of sources
discovered by these diverse state-of-the-art
telescopes.
No Instrument Upgrade
Program Call this Year
As several projects from previous years are
still underway, we decided not to have a Call
for Proposals in our Instrument Upgrade Pro-
gram this year. We expect to release our next
call in mid-2019. Visit the IUP web pages for
more information.
16
GeminiFocus
October 2018