ULTIMATE-Subaru is the next-generation facility instrument program of the Subaru Telescope which will extend the existing Subaru’s wide-field survey capability to the near-infrared wavelength. The ULTIMATE-Subaru instrument suite includes Ground-Layer Adaptive Optics (GLAO) and wide-field near-infrared instruments, aiming to provide ∼0.2 arcsec image size at K band (2.2 μm) over 20 arcmin diameter field of view at the Cassegrain focus. The planned first light instrument is a Wide-Field Imager (WFI), which covers a 14 × 14 square arcmin field of view from 0.9 to 2.5 μm in wavelength. GLAO and WFI are currently in the final design phase, aiming to start the commissioning observations at the telescope in 2028. In parallel to the development for ULTIMATE wide-field instruments, there are ongoing activities to develop a narrow-field wide-band spectrograph (NINJA) together with a Laser Tomography AO system (ULTIMATE-START) utilizing the Adaptive Secondary Mirror and the Laser Guide Star Facility being developed for the GLAO system. In this presentation, an overview of the ULTIMATE-SUBARU instruments, their current status, and future prospects will be presented.
The PFS (Prime Focus Spectrograph) instrumentation is nearly complete finally. The only missing hardware is the last two spectrograph modules, but the installations are ongoing well as of this abstract being written and are expected to complete very soon. On-sky engineering tests and observations have been carried out continually since September 2021 and, after the resolutions of some major issues on hardware and software, the team successfully observed many targeted stars over the entire field of view (Engineering First Light) in September 2022. The performances and operation of the instrument are being optimized e.g. in the accuracy and speed of fiber positioning process. Long integrations of relatively faint objects are being taken to validate expected increase of signal-to-noise ratio. Given the science operation will start soon after the commissioning process is complete, various procedures of proposing, planning, & executing observations, processing data & assessing their qualities, and delivering data to observers are being developed and tested. In this contribution, a top-level summary of these achievements and ongoing progresses and future perspectives will be provided.
Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is a next generation instrument mounted on the Subaru telescope. It is a fiber-fed multiplex system covering a wide field of view (1.3 degree in diameter), which enables to acquire approximately 2400 spectra of science objects simultaneously. In order to efficiently use fibers, open-use programs will share fibers with each other (the fiber-sharing mode). Here, we introduce the PFS Pointing Planner (PPP), the tool to optimize the pointing centers. Its goal is to efficiently observe all allocated time of science programs while assigning as many fibers as possible to science targets on each pointing. The tool incorporates a flexible weight scheme which considers factors such as the science priority, surface density and exposure time. We present the simulation results of PPP with mock science programs, and discuss its performance in diverse science cases.
PFS (Prime Focus Spectrograph), a next generation facility instrument on the Subaru telescope, is now being tested on the telescope. The instrument is equipped with very wide (1.3 degrees in diameter) field of view on the Subaru’s prime focus, high multiplexity by 2394 reconfigurable fibers, and wide waveband spectrograph that covers from 380nm to 1260nm simultaneously in one exposure. Currently engineering observations are ongoing with Prime Focus Instrument (PFI), Metrology Camera System (MCS), the first spectrpgraph module (SM1) with visible cameras and the first fiber cable providing optical link between PFI and SM1. Among the rest of the hardware, the second fiber cable has been already installed on the telescope and in the dome building since April 2022, and the two others were also delivered in June 2022. The integration and test of next SMs including near-infrared cameras are ongoing for timely deliveries. The progress in the software development is also worth noting. The instrument control software delivered with the subsystems is being well integrated with its system-level layer, the telescope system, observation planning software and associated databases. The data reduction pipelines are also rapidly progressing especially since sky spectra started being taken in early 2021 using Subaru Nigh Sky Spectrograph (SuNSS), and more recently using PFI during the engineering observations. In parallel to these instrumentation activities, the PFS science team in the collaboration is timely formulating a plan of large-sky survey observation to be proposed and conducted as a Subaru Strategic Program (SSP) from 2024. In this article, we report these recent progresses, ongoing developments and future perspectives of the PFS instrumentation.
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