Construction progress of WEAVE: the next generation wide-field spectroscopy facility for the William Herschel Telescope

Journal article

We present an update on the overall construction progress of the WEAVE next-generation spectroscopy facility for the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), now that all the major fabrication contracts are in place. We also present a summary of the current planning behind the 5-year initial phase of survey operations, and some detailed end-to-end science simulations that have been effected to evaluate the final on-sky performance after data processing. WEAVE will provide optical ground-based follow up of ground-based (LOFAR) and space-based (Gaia) surveys. WEAVE is a multi-object and multi-IFU facility utilizing a new 2-degree prime focus field of view at the WHT, with a buffered pick-and-place positioner system hosting 1000 multi-object (MOS) fibres, 20 integral field units, or a single large IFU for each observation. The fibres are fed to a single (dual-beam) spectrograph, with total of 16k spectral pixels, located within the WHT GHRIL enclosure on the telescope Nasmyth platform, supporting observations at R~5000 over the full 370-1000nm wavelength range in a single exposure, or a high resolution mode with limited coverage in each arm at R~20000. The project has experienced some delays in procurement and now has first light expected for the middle of 2019.

Authors: Dalton, G; Trager, S; Abrams, D; Lewis, I; Brock, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers
• Journal: Proceedings Volume 10702, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VII
• Volume: 10702
• Publication date: 2018-07-23
• Acceptance date: 2018-07-18
• DOI: 10.1117/12.2312031
• ISSN: 0277-786X
• Keywords: high resolution spectroscopy; fibre optics; multi-object spectroscopy