AITC Update

Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue34 1–30 November 2022

Delivering Science with GMTIFS

The AITC has a long history of developing integral field spectrographs. From WiFeS to NIFS and most recently MAVIS, the AITC has been leading the way in integral field spectroscopy (hyperspectral imaging in the parlance of the remote sensing community) on large telescopes for the two last decades. And the 25m Giant Magellan Telescope, currently Australia’s only next generation large optical/infrared telescope project, will be no different.

The AITC team is the lead institute for the GMT Integral Field Spectrograph (GMTIFS) which, following the US Decadal review and recent investment of more than US$200M from partner institutions into the GMT project, has seen its development kick into high gear. AITC engineers have recently delivered a preliminary design for the complex on-instrument wavefront sensor, a critical component on the path to delivering diffraction-limited images from the large 25m GMT aperture.

Of course, building the instrument is one side of the project – planning how to use RSAA’s expertise with the instrument to deliver cutting edge science is the other. On October 7th, the PI Rob Sharp and Project Scientist Trevor Mendel hosted a workshop aimed at just that.

The GMTIFS workshop was attended by more than 30 members of RSAA, and included overview presentations from Sharp and Mendel, as well as a discussion of key science areas focused on planets, the Milky Way, and the distant Universe from RSAA staff Michael Ireland, Luca Casagrande, and Emily Wisnioski. These talks focused on connecting RSAA’s research strengths to the capabilities of the GMTIFS instrument.

Following on from the workshop, GMTIFS is soliciting white papers for GMTIFS science programs with a view to refreshing the GMTIFS science case ensuring it stays contemporary in the JWST era and beyond. The GMTIFS team is looking to support a generation of new science simulations, so do please reach out to Rob and Trevor if you have ideas you’d like to explore. This may well be particularly important in the context of synergy with MAVIS given the angular resolution and sensitivity with visible light VLT at modest redshifts maps well to that of GMT at redshift 1 < z < 3 with GMTIFS.

Rob Sharp & Trevor Mendel