Work is going several places to bring FIES in operation in the 4th quarter of 2003. At first FIES will stay at the environmentally rather exposed position at the side of the telescope. But we will be able to check sevaral aspects of its performance. In the following sections a description of the various work packages and the progress that has been made will be presented.
In June a second allocation of funding was received from the Danish Science Research Council, which provides funding for a new fiber, coatings for the optics and realuminization of the parabolic collimators. In addition some labor costs are covered.
Drawing have been made. We are waiting for the building permissions from the authorities.
A new fiber unit is still under design. The baseline now is a system of three fibers from the telescope to the spectrograph in the new building. A small investigation points in favor of a spectrograph with a maximum response in the blue. Thus we plan to have two object fibers, a 100 micron and a 200 micron fiber of type Polymicro FVP, which transmits over 50% in the bluest part of the spectrum for a 50m fibre. In addition a 100 micron sky/calibration fiber will be installed. Calibration light will be brought up to the frontend to feed these three fibers by a 4th fiber. The size and properties of this fiber has not been defined yet. The observer will then have the following options
plus the options of taking calibration spectra through each of the three fibers.
The detailed design will be fixed after a meting in Potsdam in August. They are working on similar instruments for different telescopes at Tenerife at Potsdam, and we want to discuss various options for feeding the fibers and for organizing the the fiber input to the spectrograph.
A way to lead the fiber from the telescope to the new building has been found through a hole of dimensions 1x8 cm2 between two cooling water 'pipes'. When installing the fiber, the whole unit has to be unmounted, reassembled and put back in the central hole of dimensions ~11 cm.
The location of the ADC has been defined. It will be placed in the circular aperture in front of the adaptor. It leaves open an aperture big enough not to cause any vignetting, not even for FRED. The correction is performed by two rotating prisms, which sits on an arm that swings in and out according to whether one needs the ADC or not. The aperture of the ADC is big enough to be used with other instruments, where atmospheric dispersion affects the quality of the observations.
The mechanical parts are under production and remaining parts are being ordered including the two prisms. A danish company has been identified, which can make high quality optical coatings of the prisms.
The device will be interfaced to the adaptor and controlled by the telescope control software (TCS). How this is to be done is still under discussion with the NOT staff.
The unit is planned to be assembled and ready for shipment to La Palma by the end of september 2003. Installation will take place at some time during the 4th quarter of 2003.
An E2V Technologies 42-40 CCD has been delivered as well as a Cryotiger cooling system. A new camera head is under construction in Copenhagen and the complete camera is planned to be ready by September 2003. The idea is to take it down to the NOT together with the new ALFOSC camera later this year (2003).
A discussion of the control of instruments at the NOT took place during a FIES meeting at the NOT in January 2003. This lead to the concept of a Sequencer program, which can control a series of instruments and cameras using a well defined communication interface.
The communication to be used is likely to be the SOAP system, which is a server/client system easy to setup and understand. It has been tested and verified, that the principles are understood. The strategy right now is to write servers for the TCS and the FIES instruments, which provide a possibility to use the Sequencer program when observing with FIES (and the Standby camera supposedly?).
A separate FIES GUI will be written as well to be used in parallel or in place of the Sequencer based observing mode.
The present planning is to have a first upgraded software system ready for FIES during the 4th quater of 2003, and to test this software during the first operation of FIES late 2003. The software should include a server version of the FIES control software and a GUI on top of this, representing a client application using the SOAP interface.
The Uppsala group (Nicolai Piskunov) has offered to provide a pipeline reduction program. As soon as the first images are available, this will be initiated. The group needs to know the precise format of the spectra, target as well as calibration, before the software can be adjusted to FIES.
There are several outstanding issues not included above. We need to look at the thermal control of the box around the table. The temperature sensors used to measure the temperature at different strategic positions were unstable.
We need to look at the options for getting the large optical pieces antireflection coated. We have received various offers. The plan is to have this done when the spectrograph is reallocated to the new building.
A new photometer should be built with an improved sensitivity and better functionality. This is the last part of the upgrade to be done and included in the present budget.
Another upgrade is a set of Hartmann doors for focusing purposes as well as a possible installation of baffles inside the spectrograph to reduce straylight.
We also need to define test programs to measure and verify the performance of the instrument.