Overview of the GYES instrument: a multifibre high-resolution spectrograph for the prime focus of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope

Shan Mignot; Mathieu Cohen; Gavin Dalton; Jean-Laurent Dournaux; Gilles Fasola; Isabelle Guinouard; David Horville; Jean-Michel Huet; Philippe Laporte; Ian Lewis; Frédéric Royer

doi:10.1117/12.857094

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20 July 2010 Overview of the GYES instrument: a multifibre high-resolution spectrograph for the prime focus of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope

Shan Mignot, Mathieu Cohen, Gavin Dalton, Jean-Laurent Dournaux, Gilles Fasola, Isabelle Guinouard, David Horville, Jean-Michel Huet, Philippe Laporte, Ian Lewis, Frédéric Royer

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Proceedings Volume 7735, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy III; 77354H (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.857094
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2010, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

ESA's cornerstone mission Gaia will construct a billion-star catalogue down to magnitude 20 but will only provide detailed chemical information for the brighter stars and will be lacking radial velocity at the faint end due to insufficient Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNR). This calls for the deployment of a ground spectrograph under time scales coherent with those of Gaia for a complementary survey. The GYES instrument is a high resolution (~ 20,000) spectrometer proposed for installation on the Canada- France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) to perform this survey in the northern hemisphere. It exploits the large Field of View (FoV) available at the prime focus together with a high multiplex (~ 500 fibres) to achieve a SNR of 30 in two hours at magnitude 16 and render the survey possible on the order of 300 nights. The on-going feasibility study aims at jointly optimising all components of the system: the field corrector, the positioner, the fibres and the spectrograph. The key challenges consist in accommodating the components in the highly constrained environment of the primary focus, as well as in achieving maximum efficiency thanks to high transmission and minimum reconfiguration delays. Meanwhile, for GYES to have its first light at the time of Gaia's initial data release (2014-2015), it is mandatory to keep its complexity down by designing a predominantly passive instrument.

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Shan Mignot, Mathieu Cohen, Gavin Dalton, Jean-Laurent Dournaux, Gilles Fasola, Isabelle Guinouard, David Horville, Jean-Michel Huet, Philippe Laporte, Ian Lewis, and Frédéric Royer "Overview of the GYES instrument: a multifibre high-resolution spectrograph for the prime focus of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope", Proc. SPIE 7735, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy III, 77354H (20 July 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.857094

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