Instrument Concepts and Scientific Opportunities for TMT

摘要

The Thirty-Meter Telescope Project (TMT) aims to build a diffraction-limited, 30-m segmented mirror telescope with first light set for 2014 and first science operations for 2015. The telescope, its comprehensive adaptive optics architecture and its instruments are being designed as an end-to-end system in order to meet the demands of AO-based science. The TMT Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) has defined challenging scientific programs ranging from the tomographic exploration of the cosmic web of intergalactic hydrogen to extrasolar planets and has identified a suite of instrumental capabilities that will be required to carry them out during the first decade of TMT operation. The TMT instrumentation program has just completed a feasibility phase in which seven instrument concepts were studied. These studies have yielded innovative concepts that stretch the TMT discovery space and system-wide performance, and they are helping define detailed requirements for the telescope and observatory subsystems. Highlights from these studies are summarized and discussed.