Overview of FLAMINGOS

FLAMINGOS is a combination wide field near-IR imager and multi-object spectrometer. FLAMINGOS will be the world's first fully cryogenic near-IR spectrometer. It is designed to be portable by having a Lyot stop wheel carrying a number of stops customized for different telescopes and it can accept any input beam slower than f/7. This makes it extremely versatile allowing use on a large number of telescopes and even at multiple input focal ratios on a single telescope. Thus, it can provide a wide range of pixel scales for imaging and slit widths for spectroscopy. For example, on the NOAO 4-m telescopes it will provide 0.3 arcsecond pixels with a 10 arcminute field of view when operated at f/7 but it will also provide 0.078 arcsecond pixels with a 160 arcsecond field of view when operated at f/16 on Gemini. A reimaged focal ratio as fast as f/3 over a 52mm detector diameter makes FLAMINGOS an excellent survey imager.

FLAMINGOS has a large collimated space with a grism wheel and a filter wheel, providing multiple object near-IR survey spectroscopy at survey resolutions of 1000 and 2400. It will have a small separate cryogenic dewar with a cycling time less than 6 hours which will hold, focal plane masks; 1 imaging hole, several long slits and 11 cryogenic slit plates which are fabricated outside the dewar. This will allow multi-slit spectroscopy of 50-100 objects simultaneously. Thus, for spectroscopy FLAMINGOS will be roughly 50 times faster than current spectrometers and for survey imaging it will be more than an order of magnitude more efficient than current near-IR cameras. Wherever possible we have tried to utilize existing designs to speed the development, deployment and lower the cost of this instrument.

The FLAMINGOS cryogenic wide field imager and multi-object near-IR spectrometer which is currently under construction at the University of Florida. FLAMINGOS will be used to carry out wide field near-IR surveys and multi-object spectroscopy. The dewar consists of two sections; 1) The lower camera/collimator section (in blue) holds the optics, detector, filters and grisms, 2) The upper focal plane section (orange) holds multi-slit masks and can be thermally cycled in less than 6 hours and opened without disturbing the bulk of the instrument.