III. Spectroscopic Arrays

Reading: Single Object Observations: Large Telescope versus Multiple Small Telescopes by S. Ben-Ami & E. O. Ofek | pdf

These two facilities are under construction.

Multi-aperture Spectroscopic Telescope (MAST) consists of twenty unit telescopes each of which is a parabola of 61-cm diameter (Newtonian focus, f/3). Each unit telescope has two fibers: target and sky. The fiber opening angle is 3.44" (with plans to reduce to 2.85" eventually). The back-end consists of DeepSpec (350-850 nm, spectral resolution of 550) and HighSpec (20,000 spectral resolution and a select-able narrow band centered on Ca H&K, Mgb or Halpha).
Large Fiber Array Spectroscopic Telescope (LFAST) consists of a large number of 76-cm spherical unit telescopes. Each telescope feeds to fused silica fiber (1.3" on sky) light from 390-1700 nm. The fibers feed a very high resolution spectrograph, R of 150,000. The goal is to achieve the collecting area of Keck (phase I) and then ELT (phase II).