During the progress review, the team pre-
sented a design for a slit viewing camera to
reduce target acquisition time, and we now
intend to make this subsystem part of the
instrument’s baseline. A slit viewing camera
reduces operational overhead and gener-
ally increases overall efficiency. The project’s
E2V engineering grade devices arrived earli-
er this year (Figure 2). SwRI reported that the
four science grade E2V detectors and the
four HAWAII-2RG arrays have updated ear-
lier delivery dates in Q1 2019, before CDR.
New Integral Field Units for
GNIRS
Gemini has a long-term commitment to
produce user-motivated upgrades to the
operating instruments at both sites. The In-
strument Upgrade Program (IUP) provides
funding to upgrade existing operational in-
strumentation through community-created
science-driven proposals, creating a new
instrument capability at the Observatory.
After the public request for proposals issued
in 2017, the highest ranked proposal was to
return integral field unit (IFU) capabilities
to the Gemini Near-InfraRed Spectrometer
(GNIRS), a project lead by Ray Sharples from
the University of Durham.
Ray and his team will build and commission
two new IFUs for GNIRS, to replace the one
that was destroyed in a 2007 accident. The
first IFU will have similar specifications to
the original GNIRS IFU, with a field of view of
approximately 3 x 5 arcseconds and a spatial
sampling of 0.15 arcseconds. It will be opti-
mized for observations over the full GNIRS
wavelength range from 1.0 to 5.4 microns.
The second IFU will be AO-optimized over
the 1.0- to 2.5-micron wavelength range,
with a field of view of approximately 1.0 x 1.5
arcseconds and a spatial sampling of 0.05
arcseconds. The GNIRS IFUs will comple-
ment those of Gemini’s Near-infrared Inte-
January 2019
gral Field Spectrometer with extensions in
wavelength out to the thermal infrared L &
M bands, and spectral resolutions up to R
~ 18,000.
In December we finalized the contract with
the team for the work. We will hold a proj-
ect kickoff in January 2019, and commis-
sioning and science verification of both IFUs
is planned for November 2020. We plan to
offer the IFUs under a shared risk mode in
2021A. Re-commissioning of the IFU mode
for GNIRS will open up a unique window for
spatially resolved spectroscopy on Gemini,
including study of the kinematics of stellar
outflows around high-mass young stellar
objects, probing the active galactic nucle-
us-starburst connection, estimating black
hole masses from infrared line diagnostics,
resolved spectroscopy of gravitationally
lensed galaxies, and resolving jet dynamics
in Herbig-Haro objects.
The project will be entirely based at the
Centre for Advanced Instrumentation (CfAI)
at Durham University, where the origi-
nal GNIRS IFU was designed and built. The
project will exploit the in-house diamond
machining facilities that have since been
used to deliver successful image slicing IFU
instruments for the James Webb Space Tele-
scope (NIRSpec IFU) and European Southern
Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (KMOS).
This facility was not available at the time of
manufacture of the original GNIRS IFU and
will enable substantial improvements in
performance.
GIRMOS Project Ready to Roll
The Gemini InfraRed Multi-Object Spectro-
graph (GIRMOS) is a welcome addition to
the Gemini Visiting Instrument Program.
This powerful new instrument is being de-
signed to have the ability to observe mul-
tiple sources simultaneously at high angular
resolution while obtaining spectra at the
GeminiFocus
15