| Abstract: The Indian astronomical community has participated extensively in the design of TMT’s first-light instruments, gaining valuable insight into the technical, organizational, and systems-level challenges that accompany extremely large telescopes. During the design phase, the TMT instrument suite—including the Wide Field Optical Spectrograph (WFOS), the Infrared Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), and MODHIS—has undergone multiple iterations driven by difficult trade-off studies involving performance, complexity, risk, and cost. In this talk, I will focus in particular on WFOS, a multi-object slit spectrograph, and IRIS, an adaptive-optics-fed integral field spectrograph, highlighting the key challenges, debates, and consensus-building processes that shaped their final designs.
I will then discuss how these design-phase lessons can inform the development of the next generation of instruments for existing Indian ground-based telescopes, as well as future facilities such as the proposed National Large Optical Telescope. In the Indian context, I will highlight ongoing efforts to develop a configurable-slit multi-object infrared spectrograph, as well as India’s participation in the SCALES integral field spectrograph being built for Keck. Together, these examples illustrate how experience gained from ELT-scale instrument design can directly benefit national instrumentation programs. |
