The primary accomplishment of 2013 was
the successful production of a complete
200-meter-long test fiber that met all the
project requirements. The fiber is GRACES’s
most critical component. As the article goes
to press, the vendor (FiberTech) has completed one of the two needed full-length
science fibers with initial testing that appears promising. The final 270-meter-long
optical fiber cable, with its two individual
shielded fibers, is expected to be completed and sent to NRC-Herzberg (formerly the
Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics) in January, 2014. In order to compete with other
similar 8- to 10-meter class instruments, the
fiber must achieve its specified high performance in term of its focal-ratio degradation
(FRD), internal transmission, and spectral
range coverage.
The successful 200-meter test fiber was a
milestone event toward achieving the required FRD within the 270-meter-long science cable of ~10 percent (required) to ~20
percent (goal); the test cable was fabricated,
polished, shielded, and had connectors attached before it was tested and delivered in
July. All of the optics (e.g., lenses and slicer)
and commercial hardware (e.g., translation
stages, adjusters, and mounts) have been
received, and the custom hardware parts
have been fabricated, many of them in the
machine shop at NRC-Herzberg.
The injector unit uses a Gemini North MultiObject Spectrograph (GMOS-N) filter cassette,
which allows GMOS-N to act as an acquisition
camera for GRACES. Permanently installed in
ESPaDOnS, the slicer (see Figure 6) includes a
deployable fold mirror that allows ESPaDOnS
to be used with the C !P