The 2024 FOBOS Science Workshop will be held at the UCSC Silicon Valley Campus from 25-26 March.
To attend, please register here by March 11, 2024. Registration is free and lunch will be provided on both days. We encourage all those interested to attend; however, note that the venue space is limited. Arranging travel and local accommodation is the responsibility of the attendees.
The purpose of the workshop is to refresh FOBOS’s key science cases and explore transformative new ideas in preparation for upcoming funding proposals. We want to hear about your science interests with FOBOS and we’re particularly interested in possible large-scale, multi-year programs (think big!) involving your extended collaboration networks that can begin as soon as FOBOS is installed at Keck II. The workshop will also include brief instrument presentations and breakout discussions.
Below, you’ll find brief descriptions of and links to (1) FOBOS’s key instrumental capabilities and specifications, (2) the design-reference programs included in our Conceptual Design Review, and (3) a list of tools that can help you design and test the feasibility of new programs.
FOBOS’s Key Instrumental Capabilities
- 20 arcmin circular field-of-view
- 3 identical 4-channel spectrographs with R ~ 3500 and covering 0.31-1 micron
- each spectrograph deploys either ~550 single-fiber apertures or 14 IFUs; or fibers from all spectographs can feed a 37.6″ monolithic IFU
- limiting magnitude is r ~ 24.5 (S/N~1 after 1 hr)
Previous Design-Reference Programs
FOBOS will enable us to:
- study the circumgalactic medium in emission for galaxies at z~2 using its deployable IFUs,
- produce high-spatial-resolution tomographic maps of the intergalactic medium along sight-lines toward normal background galaxies,
- collect spectra for thousands of galaxies at z=2-4 that can be stacked and used in statistical studies of their chemical enrichment histories,
- build unique spectroscopic redshift samples critical to the photo-z training used in LSST dark-energy studies,
- observe large samples of stars in the Andromeda disk, enabling studies comparable to Galactic archeology,
- measure the kinematics of thousands of stars in Local Group dwarf galaxies, providing key constraints on the nature of dark matter, and
- deliver timely follow-up of transient phenomena, such as the kilonovae.
FOBOS program preparation tools
Preliminary tools useful for designing and testing the feasibility of potential FOBOS programs are:
- Exposure-time calculator: https://synospec.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fobos_etc.html
- Field and aperture allocation planning: https://fobos-producer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Preliminary Schedule
Contacts
If you have any questions please reach out to the organizers:
Kyle Westfall (westfall@ucolick.org): FOBOS Project Scientist
Kevin Bundy (kbundy@ucsc.edu): FOBOS PI