staff were invited to participate in the Kick-
off Meeting on December 4-5 at the Dunlap
Institute in Toronto, Canada (Figure 3). The
meeting was extremely productive, with
discussions on science cases, capabilities,
schedules, and responsibilities as we move
into the conceptual design phase.
Figure 3.
GIRMOS Prinicipal
Investigator Suresh
Sivanandam (right) with
Kick-off Meeting
participants.
Credit: University of Toronto
Figure 4.
Celebrating first light
with the MAROON-X
Front End. From left
to right: Gemini senior
instrumentation engineer
John White, Gemini
Instrument and user
support scientist Alison
Peck, and University of
Chicago representatives
Julian Stuermer and
Andreas Seifahrt.
Credit: Siyi Xu, Gemini
Observatory
signed to have the ability to observe mul-
tiple sources simultaneously at high angular
resolution while obtaining spectra at the
same time (Sivanandam et al., Proc. SPIE,
2018). It accomplishes this by exploiting the
adaptive optics (AO) correction from both
a telescope-based AO system (either the
Gemini Multi-conjugate adaptive optics Sys-
tem (GeMS) or the prospective Gemini North
AO system) and its own additional Multiple-
Object Adaptive Optics system that feeds
four 1- to 2.4-micron integral field spectro-
graphs (R ~ 3,000 and 8,000) that can each
observe an object independently within a 2
arcminute field of view.
GIRMOS is being designed and built by a
Canadian consortium of universities led by
the University of Toronto and the National
Research Council-Herzberg Institute of As-
tronomy and Astrophysics. The GIRMOS
project is just getting underway, and Gemini
In January, members of the GIRMOS team
will come to Chile to participate in GeMS ob-
serving to learn more about the AO system
and current telescope operations. We are
very excited about working with the team on
this cutting-edge new capability for Gemini,
and we look forward to a fruitful collabora-
tion over the next few years!
MAROON-X Front End
Commissioning
MAROON-X is a radial velocity spectrograph
being built at the University of Chicago,
which is expected to have the capability to
detect Earth-size planets in the habitable
zones of mid- to late-M dwarf stars using the
radial velocity method. The instrument is a
high-resolution, bench-mounted spectro-
graph designed to deliver 1 meter/second
radial velocity precision for M dwarfs down
to and beyond V = 16. In order for MAROON-
X to come to Gemini as a visiting instrument,
the team had to construct a Front End that
would fit on the bottom instrument port at
Gemini North, while holding the fiber that
runs down to the spectrograph located in
the Pier Lab below.
This Front End unit recently arrived in
Hawai‘i, and was installed on the telescope
for testing in December. The commissioning
has gone very well, thanks to the diligence
and care that the instrument team have put
into the design and construction, and the
excellent support we have received from the
Gemini engineering staff.
We achieved first light on the same day as
installation (Figure 4), and spent a few hours
44
GeminiFocus
January 2019 / 2018 Year in Review