GeminiFocus April 2017 | Page 17

Stephen Goodsell, on behalf of the OCTOCAM team The Chosen One: OCTOCAM (Gen4#3) With great pleasure we proudly announce our next facility-class instrument: OCTOCAM, a wide-band (visible/near-infrared) medium- resolution spectrograph and imager. This powerful facility will support a wide range of science and take advantage of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope follow-up opportunities. In May 2016 Gemini released a Request for Proposals for the next facility-class Gemini instru- ment (then known as Gen4#3). The Observatory received a total of four proposals by our August deadline. After a thorough selection process involving internal and external experts, we selected OCTOCAM, signing a contract to design, build, and commission the instrument with the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas, in March 2017. The OCTOCAM team began immediately thereafter to work on the Conceptual Design Stage, with Antonio de Ugarte Postigo (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, of the Consejo Su- perior de Investigaciones Científicas (IAA-CSIC)) as the Principal Investigator, Pete Roming (SwRI) as the Project Manager, Alexander van der Horst (George Washington University) as the Project Scientist and Christina Thöne (IAA-CSIC) as the Deputy Project Manager. A ma- jor member of the collaboration i ncludes FRACTAL S.L.N.E. (a private technological company specialized in astronomical instrumentation). Together, we intend to commission OCTOCAM at Gemini South for general use before the 2023 planned start of Large Synoptic Survey Tele- scope (LSST) operations. What is OCTOCAM? OCTOCAM is an 8-channel imager and spectrograph that will simultaneously observe the g, r, i, z, Y, J, H, and K S bands in a 3’ x 3’ field-of-view. It will obtain long slit (3’ long) spectroscopy April 2017 GeminiFocus 15