GHOST Update

AAO staff Vlad Churilov and Lew Waller steady the instrument as it is lowered onto load cells for mass and center of gravity measurements.  Gemini’s Gabriel Perez is in the background inputting the load cell data to calculate the center of gravity.  Photo credit: David Henderson

The build of the GHOST Cassegrain unit is nearly complete. Last week, Gemini staff participated in the weighing and inspection of the fully assembled Cassegrain unit at the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) lab in North Ryde, New South Wales. Testing of the Integral Filed Unit (IFU) positioner by AAO and Australian National University software staff will continue for another month in the lab. Once completed the Cassegrain unit will ship to Chile, where the team will begin preliminary testing and debugging on the telescope early next year in preparation for the arrival of the spectrograph from NRC-Herzberg in Canada.