Some of largest parts of MOONS so far have just arrived in Edinburgh from Italy! Thanks Arcetri!
In the box lie the support structures for the collimator mirrors, one for each of the spectrographs. Each support structure alone weighs 70kg, and another 70kg for the mirrors themselves. We don’t yet have the mirrors, although one of the supports has a blank mirror to allow us to practise alignment before we get the real thing.
These large mirrors over 600mm in length are used to collimate the beam as it leaves the fibres. The beam is reflected back past the slit and on towards the dichroics that split up the light.
A long way to go, but it’s exciting to see some big chunks of hardware arriving in the lab. The next question is: where on earth do we put everything?!
MOONS: Multi-object Optical and Near-IR spectrograph 