Academia Sinica, the nation’s top academic and science research institute, signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) yesterday to collaborate on optical and infrared wavelength astronomy and the development of a new camera for the Subaru Telescope.
Academia Sinica President Wong Chi-huey (翁啟惠) and Paul Ho (賀曾樸), director of the preparatory office of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (IAA), sealed the partnership in Toyko, Japan, Academia Sinica said in a statement.
Subaru, built and first operated by the NAOJ in 1991, is an 8.2m optical infrared telescope situated at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
It is the NAOJ’s flagship telescope and one of the largest and most advanced optical telescopes in the world.
The statement said the NAOJ in 2006 proposed building a new camera, called the “Hyper Suprime-Cam” (HSC), for the telescope.
The next-generation, very wide field camera’s targeted field of view is 1.5 degrees, giving it almost 10 times the field of view and survey speed of the telescope’s existing Subaru Prime Focus Camera (Suprime-Cam), while maintaining the equivalent image quality necessary for weak lensing surveys.
The camera’s development began last year, and it is scheduled to be completed in 2012. It will be the world’s largest charge-coupled device (CCD) camera, containing 120 CCD chips, each with an 8 million pixel resolution, the statement said.
The IAA was invited to develop special components for the camera and to join scientific observatory projects involving the state-of-the-art device.
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