The design and development of NIRSPEC, a near-IR echelle spectrograph for the Keck II 10-meter telescope is described. This instrument is a large, facility-class vacuum-cryogenic spectrometer with a resolving power of R equals 25,000 for a 0.4 inch slit. It employs diamond-machined metal optics and state-of-the-art IR array detectors for high throughput, together with powerful user-friendly software for ease of use.
NIRSPEC is a recently funded, high-resolution, 1 - 5 micrometers cryogenic spectrograph for the Keck II telescope. The design of this new instrument is based on 1024 X 1024 InSb arrays and provides resolving powers of R equals 2,000 in non-cross-dispersed mode and R equals 25,000 in echelle mode with typically 5 to 6 orders on the array covering 60 - 90% of the selected waveband, J, H, K, or L, in a single observation. Later, even higher resolution can be achieved by using the proposed adaptive optics facility at Keck II and replacing some of the internal modules of NIRSPEC. This paper gives a brief description of the proposed design concepts, and a discussion of the detector and system constraints required to achieve the scientific goals of the instrument.
This paper describes the performance of a unique new IR array camera system which provides simultaneous imaging at two wavelengths in the near IR. Two-color imaging is achieved with a dichroic beam splitter which yields two independent beams, one short-wave (SW) from 1 to 2.5 micrometers and one long-wave (LW) from 2 to 5 micrometers . A Rockwell NICMOS 3 256 by 256 HgCdTe array is used in the SW channel and the LW channel has an InSb 256 by 256 array from SBRC. The instrument, which is designed for the University of California's Lick Observatory 3-m telescope and for the f/15 focus of the 10-m W.M. Keck telescope, employs a closed cycle refrigerator and a compact array control/data acquisition system based on transputers with a host 486 PC. On the Lick 3-m telescope the pixel size is 0.7' which gives a field of view of about 180' by 180'. Facilities are also provided for spectroscopy and polarimetry. Recent observational results are reported to illustrate the performance of this system.
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