KMOS
Short Description:
KMOS is a new cryogenic near infrared instrument which will combine the advantages of multiplexing with the power of integral field spectroscopy.
A consortium of German and British institutes together with ESO developed KMOS as one of the so called second generation VLT instruments.
The baseline concept is to have 24 integral field units (IFUs), each of which has 14x14 spatial elements providing a 2.8 arcsec field of view and can be positioned anywhere in the 7.2arcmin diameter unvignetted field of the VLT Nasmyth focus.
There will be three identical spectrographs with a resolving power of about 3500 in the J, H, and K bands, each fed by 8 IFUs and equipped with a Hawaii 2RG array with 2K x 2K pixels.
The cryostat is 2 m in diameter and 1.5 m high, and will be cooled to 77 K by three closed cycle coolers.
Project Type:
Instrument for ground-based telescope; Software.
MPE Contribution:
science workpackage
detector procurement
data reduction Software
Status:
Commissioning runs were performed in November/December 2012, and January and March 2013.
Regular operations will start in ESO period 92 (October 2013)
Links:
Infrared/Submillimeter Astronomy (web pages of the MPE department involved in the project)
News:
Commissioning and Science Verification of KMOS (ESO Science Announcement April 17, 2013)
