THE UNITED KINGDOM INFRARED TELESCOPE
ANNUAL REPORT
1995 AND 1996

5. Instrumentation Development

5.5. Longer-term Plans: the Wide-Field Camera-Spectrometers

For the further future a straw-man ten-year plan for UKIRT has been developed. This stresses the acquisition of capabilities for wide-field astronomy, as did the longer-term plans recommended by the Ground-Based Telescopes Development Panel (Williams Panel). The plan envisages conversion of the telescope to f/16 by the installation of a new tip/tilt secondary mirror, at the same time as an upgrade to UIST to allow it to exploit the larger FOV offered. (Michelle, of course, will already be equipped for conversion to f/16.) The full exploitation of the faster f/ratio would be based on the development of modular widefield imagers which would be equipped with front-end facilities to provide multi-slit multi-object spectroscopy, at least at 1-2.5 microns and possibly 1-5 microns. These instruments would view a field divided into four quadrants by a pyramid mirror near the focal plane.

The final ensemble of instruments, proposed for completion in 2008, would offer ``standard'' mode observing including high-resolution imaging and long-slit and single (point-) source spectroscopy from 1 to 5 microns and, of course, mid-infrared capabilities using Michelle. It would also offer imaging and multi-slit spectroscopy over a field 13.4 arcminutes square, the largest which can be achieved at f/16 without modification of the primary mirror cooling system, which has components in the central aperture of the primary mirror. Such modification could in principle allow fields up to 30 arcminutes square.