Steady progress in development of the near-infrared instrument SWIMS mounted on the TAO 6.5-m telescope.
--Extensible robotic arm manipulating slitmask plates for multi-object spectroscopy completed--.

SWIMS is an near-infrared instrument mounted on the TAO 6.5-m telescope. We have started the design in 2009, and the development is in progress steadily. SWIMS is capable of an wide-field imaging and mutli-object spectroscopy observations, and enables simultaneous imaging or spectroscopy covering two wavelength ranges in the near-infrared. In December 2010, an extensible robotic arm manipulating slitmask plates for multi-object spectroscopy has been fabricated.

The extensible robotic arm to manipulate slitmask plates for multi-object spectroscopy (on the blue table) and the development team consisting of the SWIMS members in IoA and members from companies related to the fabrication.

The illustration below shows the appearance of SWIMS whose dimension are about 2×2×2m³ in size and 2 tons in weight.The red-colored part corresponds to the robotic arm which can stretch up to about 28 inches. The arm pulls out a slitmask plate stored in a carrousel in the mask dewar (yellow-colored), and puts it on the focal plane located in the focal plane dewar (blue-colored).

Fabrication of the robotic arm has been cooperated with ADSTEC Co., Sentencia Co., LUMINAS Co., VIC International, Inc., PASCAL Co., Ltd., and OptCraft Co.