30 Sep 2022

Since our previous WEAVE news release in May, there has been a flood of activity, to prepare, calibrate and test all of the WEAVE subsystems, now working together for the first time.

After a few initial problems, the image quality in the focal plane is now excellent, the spectrograph is well-focused and the other subsystems are working well enough to begin commissioning the LIFU mode of observations. LIFU commissioning has begun this week, and will be followed by science verification of the LIFU mode, and then, once the other sub-systems are ready, commissioning of the mIFU and MOS modes.

We at ING are sure that you share our excitement to be so close to generating real science data with this fantastic instrument, and we thank the WEAVE community for their patience, enthusiasm and encouragement.

About WEAVE

The main components of WEAVE are:

• Fibre–positioner, developed by the University of Oxford and RAL Space in the UK, with support from the IAC.
• Prime-focus corrector, designed by ING and SENER, provided by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Spain and manufactured by SENER. Support from Konkoly Observatory (HU). Lenses were polished by KiwiStar in New Zealand, funded from STFC, NOVA, INAF and ING, and mounted at SENER Aeroespacial (Spain) by SENER and ING.
• Field Rotator, provided by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Spain and manufactured by IDOM (Spain).

• Optical fibres, provided by the Observatoire de Paris in France, manufactured in France, Canada and USA.
• Spectrograph, built by NOVA in the Netherlands with optical design by RAL Space in the UK, optics manufactured at INAOE (MX) and support from INAF (IT) and the IAC (ES).
• CCD detectors system, provided by Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.
• Data processing, analysis and archiving, led by the University of Cambridge (UK) with support from the IAC (ES) and INAF (IT).

[Image]

(A) The William Herschel Telescope with (in black) the new 6-lens corrector and WEAVE mounted at the top end. Photo taken on a pre-commissioning night. 

(B) WEAVE at the top end of the WHT, with the telescope parked near-horizontal. One of the two plates for multi-object spectroscopy can be seen, surrounded by the fibre-retraction boxes. Above these is the gantry supporting the fibre-positioning robots.