Representatives from the Thirty Meter Telescope’s (TMT’s) Wide-Field Optical Spectrograph (WFOS) team and TMT’s China partners will gather in China to discuss potential collaboration during the next stage of the conceptual design of WFOS.
WFOS is planned to be one of TMT’s first-light instruments. It will offer extraordinary new capabilities to study the early, distant universe, including the first stars and galaxies, and the intergalactic medium.
WFOS is now in its conceptual design phase, studying two different instrument designs: a slicer-based concept, and a fiber-based concept. The final decision will be made in March 2018. The next step will then include optimizing and prototyping the opto-mechanical design, fiber or slicer concepts, cameras, dispersive architecture, large refractive gratings, dichroics, robotics systems, and details of detector design. This will be followed by a two-year preliminary design phase, then final design, fabrication and integration and test phases, prior to fielding and commissioning on the telescope.