Paper
30 June 2006 VIRUS: a massively replicated integral-field spectrograph for HET
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Abstract
We present the design of, and the science drivers for, the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS). This instrument is made up of 145 individually small and simple spectrographs, each fed by a fiber integral field unit. The total VIRUS-145 instrument covers ~30 sq. arcminutes per observation, providing integral field spectroscopy from 340 to 570 nm, simultaneously, of 35,670 spatial elements, each 1 sq. arcsecond on the sky. This corresponds to 15 million resolution elements per exposure. VIRUS-145 will be mounted on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope and fed by a new wide-field corrector with 22 arcminutes diameter field of view. VIRUS represents a new approach to spectrograph design, offering the science multiplex advantage of huge sky coverage for an integral field spectrograph, coupled with the engineering multiplex advantage of >100 spectrographs making up a whole. VIRUS is designed for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) which will use baryonic acoustic oscillations imprinted on the large-scale distribution of Lyman-α emitting galaxies to provide unique constraints on the expansion history of the universe that can constrain the properties of dark energy.
© (2006) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Gary J. Hill, Phillip J. MacQueen, Joseph R. Tufts, Andreas Kelz, Martin M. Roth, Werner Altmann, Pedro Segura, Karl Gebhardt, and Povilas Palunas "VIRUS: a massively replicated integral-field spectrograph for HET", Proc. SPIE 6269, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy, 62692J (30 June 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.672630
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Cited by 7 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Spectrographs

Telescopes

Prototyping

Mirrors

Cameras

Collimators

Sensors

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