Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Early light TMT instrumentation

2008; SPIE; Volume: 7014; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1117/12.787605

1996-756X

D. Crampton, Luc Simard, David R. Silva,

Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project will provide diffraction limited and seeing limited capabilities that will be highly synergistic with JWST and other planned astronomy missions. TMT will thus be poised to tackle most of the questions confronting scientists today and for the next several decades. The early light instrumentation will provide NIR imaging and integral field spectroscopy designed to sample even the tiny 7mas images provided at 1.2 microns by a multi-conjugate laser guide star AO system, near-infrared multi-slit spectroscopy over a 2 arcmin field (fed by the same AO system, tuned for wide field performance), and wide field multi-object spectroscopy in the 0.3 - 1 micron wavelength region. TMT is being designed, as a system, to take advantage of the observational opportunities that a diffraction limited 30m telescope will afford. Results of detailed end-to-end modeling demonstrate excellent performance in both seeing-limited and diffraction-limited modes. TMT is also being designed to operate in a very efficient manner. Details of how this will be accomplished, descriptions of the planned instrumentation with focus on the early light instruments, new technologies that will be implemented, and a summary of the anticipated observing programs and how these will complement observations from other facilities are described.