CFHT Instrumentation for 2013 and beyond

News

April 1st, 2008

Four teams receive funding to move forward their instrument concept (1 Apr 2008)

Four teams were awarded seed  funding to conduct a feasibility/conceptual study. With collaborations extending over the communities served by CFHT and even beyond, these teams will work in collaboration with CFHT to be ready to submit their report on October 1st, 2008, with up to two to be selected for a Phase A study. Final selection will be made at the end of 2009. The table below lists these four projects.

Name
 Brief Description
 PI(s)
FIRST
 Fibered Imager foR Single Telescope
A visible high angular resolution and high dynamic range imager to study exoplanetary systems and compact objects in general, addressing galactic to extragalactic science cases.
 G.Perrin
`IMAKA
 Imaging from MAuna KeA with an atmosphere corrected 1 sq deg imager
Significant image quality improvement to 0.3 arcsecond for a one square degree optical imager using ground layer adaptive optics (GLAO) and a 1.4 Gpixels elastic CCD focal plane.
 R.Carlberg 
H.Richer
SITELLE
 Spectromètre Imageur à Transformée de Fourier pour l’Etude en Long et en Large de raies d’Emission
A wide field Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer (IFTS) providing the spectral information in the visible (350 nm – 1000 nm) for every single object in a 20’ field of view at a spectral resolution from 1 (panchromatic image) up to 10000.
 L.Drissen
SPIRou
 		A nIR spectropolarimeter for detecting earth-like planets of low-mass stars and investigating the role of magnetic fields in the star and planet formation process.
 		J.F.Donati


Other proposals welcome!

Beyond the four instruments listed above, CFHT is ready to receive other proposals by October 1st, 2008 for new instruments.

Such proposals should be in the form of a Feasibility Study Report following an overall layout as follows:

Executive Summary

1. Introduction

2. Scientific case

3. Instrument requirements as dictated by core science requirements

4. Instrument concept

5. Development requirements

6. Operations and Data Processing

7. Development Roadmap and first cost estimate


Interested teams should keep in mind the preparatory document (accessible here) issued before the 2007 Users' Meeting, which states: For guidance, the cost to CFHT of MegaCam and WIRCam was in the order of 4 to 5M$, and this provides a very rough estimate of the scale of the new projects that can be contemplated for projects that would only be supported by the current Agencies. Larger scale projects would have to consider new partners.

Interested teams are welcome to contact CFHT by email ( director at cfht.hawaii.edu ) if additional information is needed.


Selection process schedule

CFHT intends to have up to two proposals be selected by the end of 2008 for a Phase A study to take place in 2009. By the end of 2009, at least one of them will be funded for deployment on the telescope in 2013 at the latest.


Link to the Call for Proposals for Feasibility Studies (Sep 2007)