Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope research & development

NRC is leading this cooperative effort to allow starlight gathered by Gemini to be fed into a specialized instrument at the Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope (CFHT), allowing users to learn more about the characteristics of objects in space. Project Overview.

MSE is a proposed upgrade to the existing 3.6-m CFHT, to replace it with a 10-m-class, wide-field telescope dedicated to extreme multi-object spectroscopy. NRC led the Feasibility Study for this project and is involved in numerous aspects of the ongoing Construction Proposal Phase, scheduled for completion in 2017.

SPIRou is a near-infrared spectropolarimeter and high-precision velocimeter being designed as a new instrument for CFHT, with first light planned for 2017. The main science goals of SPIRou are the search and characterization of habitable exo-Earths around low-mass stars, and the study of the magnetic topology of young protostars as a tool for investigating star/planet formation mechanisms. The SPIRou collaboration involves many institutions within the CFHT community. NRC is contributing the design of the cryogenic spectrograph subsystem.

Canada and France combined a significant portion of their telescope time from mid-2003 to early 2009 for a large project; the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS). The data acquisition and calibration have been a major undertaking for the Canadian and French communities: more than 2300 hours over 5 years (an equivalent of 450 nights) have been devoted to the survey using the wide field optical imaging camera MegaCam, a 1 degree by 1 degree field of view 340 Megapixel camera. The CFHTLS has contributed to a range of scientific questions, from the measurement of the cosmic expansion rate to the measurement of the structure of the solar system. NRC contributed both scientific expertise and, through the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC), primary distribution of data products and calibration.

PAndAS is a large survey using the CFHT designed to explore the structure and content of the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), and its close neighbour, the Triangulum Galaxy (M33). To date, more than 300 hours of CFHT time have been used to resolve millions of stars in these galaxies using CFHT's 340 megapixel imager, MegaCam.

The NGVS is a CFHT large program to image the Virgo cluster of galaxies — the dominant mass concentration in the local universe and the largest galaxy collection within 100 million light years — from its core to its virial radius. This 100 square degree region (equivalent in area to about 500 full moons) is being mapped in five optical filters using MegaCam. The NGVS team is comprised of about 45 scientists at research institutes across Canada and the world, including NRC and the University of Waterloo.

The team recently discovered hundreds of new galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, suggesting that galaxy formation on small scales may be more complicated than previously thought. Based on data collected over the course of 6 years with Megacam, a 340 Megapixels camera at CFHT, the NGVS team was able to observe the cluster in its entirety, at a depth and resolution that significantly exceeds those of any existing survey.

The Outer Solar System Origins Survey is an imaging survey using 400 hours of observing time with the CFHT's mosaic imaging camera and will map out the structure of the region of the solar system beyond Neptune. This survey, a continuation of the Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey (CFEPS), will discover over 500 new Kuiper belt objects whose orbits and physical properties will provide the information needed to better understand how planets form.