This week MOONS has taken delivery of its first major optical components, the RI band dichroics. Each of the two MOONS spectrographs has three different spectral channels; light is split into these channels through two dichroics. The dichroics received are the first ones in the beam, which reflect the short wavelength radiation into the RI camera and allow longer wavelength light to pass through.
These optics have been manufactured for the MOONS consortium by the US company Materion. At around 40 x 30 cm, they are extremely large optics to manufacture and handle. We are delighted to report that the as-built transmission and reflection properties of these optics exceed the requirements we had requested from Materion, which is obviously excellent news.
The second set of dichroics, that reflect light into the YJ cameras, have also been manufactured and should be delivered to the consortium very shortly.
MOONS: Multi-object Optical and Near-IR spectrograph 