Starbugs are miniaturised robotic devices that position optical fibres over a telescope’s focal plane in parallel operation for high multiplex spectroscopic surveys. The key advantage of the Starbug positioning system is its potential to configure fields of hundreds of targets in a few minutes, consistent with typical detector readout times. Starbugs have been selected as the positioning technology for the TAIPAN (Transforming Astronomical Imaging surveys through Polychromatic Analysis of Nebulae) instrument, a prototype for MANIFEST (Many Instrument Fiber System) on the GMT (Giant Magellan Telescope). TAIPAN consists of a 150-fibre Starbug positioner accessing the 6 degree field-ofview of the AAO’s UK Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory. For TAIPAN, it is important to optimise the target allocation and routing algorithms to provide the fastest configurations times. We present details of the algorithms and results of the simulated performance.

Date Published: 18 July 2014
PDF: 21 pages
Proc. SPIE 9152, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy III, 91520S (18 July 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2055047

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9152:
Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy III
Gianluca Chiozzi; Nicole M. Radziwill, Editor(s)