| Purpose
MUSE is one of four 2nd generation instruments for the
ESO Very Large Telescope. It is currently being built by a
consortium of 6 European institutes
and will be transferred to ESO for installation at the
telescope during 2012/2013.
Since MUSE will record some 90,000 spectra simultaneously,
it needs more than one spectrograph. In fact, the instrument
consists of 24 identical spectrographs that are fed through
the Nasmyth focus of the VLT Unit 4 telescope (figure
left/top). |
Basic principle of operation
MUSE is an integral field spectrograph, i.e. it
obtaines a full spectrum for each spatial pixel in the
field of view; the output of MUSE is a datacube. The
overall layout of the system is shown in the right
figure.
Contrary to many other integral field instruments, the
partitioning of the focal plane is not done by fibres and/or
lenslets, but by image slicers. Each slicer mirror cuts a little
"mini-slit" out of the full image and sends it into the
spectrograph (figure left/down). |
