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

Conference item

We present the Final Design of the WEAVE next-generation spectroscopy facility for the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), together with a status update on the details of manufacturing, integration and the overall project schedule 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. 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 is now in the manufacturing and integration phase with first light expected for early of 2018.

Authors: Dalton, G; Trager, S; Abrams, D; Bonifacio, P; Aguerri, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers
• Host title: Proceedings of SPIE
• Journal: Proceedings of SPIE
• Volume: 9908
• Article number: 99081G
• Publication date: 2016-08-04
• Acceptance date: 2016-07-20
• DOI: 10.1117/12.2231078
• ISSN: 1996-756X
• Keywords: high resolution spectroscopy; fibre optics; multi-object spectroscopy