GeminiFocus October 2014 | Page 19

may be awarded to profit or nonprofit institutions or companies outside of the nations that fund the Gemini Observatory’s instrument program. Gemini encourages collaborations and will provide a mechanism for groups to find additional partners to form a complete team for this work. Thus, groups with some interest in GIFS, but lacking the complete expertise needed to complete the work, should still submit a letter of intent and use our system to find additional partners for the work. The following timeline applies: A Bidders Conference will be held on October 31st; notice of intent to submit a proposal is due November 17th; and the deadline to submit proposals will be on December 15th at 23:00 Pacific Standard Time. ditional noise. The current system had mechanisms which moved small probes where each of the three guide stars were located in the image. This led to reliability problems with the mechanisms and throughput issues related to the probe design. The new ANU-designed system will be able to image the entire field, allowing the control software to measure the jitter of stars in the field without any moving parts. The NGS2 subsystem will be delivered by 2016. It is expected to remarkably increase the amount of sky available for GeMS observations, improve image quality, and increase the robustness of the GeMS system. The GIFS Project Team looks forward to hearing from you. For full details, please visit our website here. NGS Upgrade AURA/Gemini and the Australian National University (ANU) have entered into an agreement to significantly upgrade the Gemini Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics System (GeMS) at Gemini South. The advanced technology of GeMS requires the use of up to three Natural Guide Stars (NGS). These are measured by an NGS subsystem, which helps stabilize the images by removing jitter seen by the science camera. ANU will design and build a new NGS subsystem, called the Natural Guide Star New Generation Sensor 2 (NGS2). NGS2 will be 10 times more sensitive than the current NGS subsystem and will operate with no moving parts. This is possible due to recent advancements in imaging detector technology, which can image most of the GeMS field-of-view several hundred times per second with very little ad- October 2014 GeminiFocus 17