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Associate Project Manager Blog

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At First Light: TMT’s Wide-Field Optical Spectrograph

It’s been some time since my last blog entry because TMT has been keeping me rather busy. I’ll talk about some of the latest happenings in upcoming entries as soon as time permits. However, before letting any more time go by, I’d like to take a moment to highlight TMT’s WFOS system.

WFOS is TMT's Wide-Field Optical Spectrograph, one of our “first light” science instruments. We want a wide imaging field, so that we can look at a lot of objects of astronomical interest all at the same time, which is particularly important for performing efficient surveys of large sections of the sky. The spectrograph will split up light into its different colors, allowing us identify which chemicals are in the objects we are looking at.

We want this instrument installed, commissioned and operational on the telescope when TMT goes live for the very first time. We've been working on this instrument for some time now, and I'll be writing more in the future about the contributions of the different teams around the world that are leading the design effort. For now, my colleague Dr. Kevin Bundy (Principal Investigator of WFOS) has written this nice article that gives an update on how the design of this instrument has been evolving, and the latest news.


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