By/par Mike Fich (Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics) and the Canadian CCAT team
The CCAT team is pleased to announce that another major milestone has been reached in this project: the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) has arrived in Chile and assembly on the CCAT Observatory site will begin within the next few weeks. Telescope commissioning will follow in August 2025. First light instruments (a broad-band camera and a heterodyne spectrometer) will be installed in February 2026.
The Sloman Discoverer carrying the CCAT telescope through the Miraflores Locks of the Panama Canal
FYST is a 6-meter diameter submillimeter survey telescope and will be located at the best submillimetre site that has been identified anywhere in the world. The CCAT partnership is led by Cornell University with German, Canadian, and Chilean partners. The Canadian participation is channelled through the Canadian Atacama Telescope Consortium (CATC) and includes researchers at ten Canadian universities. The central camera module for FYST – a 350-micron 50,000-pixel device – is under development by a multi-institutional team led by Scott Chapman at UBC and scheduled for installation in 2027. This camera will be the crowning jewel of FYST Planning is now underway for the Canadian provision of a second-generation camera to follow in a few years. Much more detail on the project is available at the website www.ccatobservatory.org.
The CCAT team has been actively planning the science activities for FYST for several years and the plans are now in a quite mature state. All of the observing time with FYST will be used in large surveys that are now well-defined. Eight Key Projects have been identified. Four of these Key Projects have Canadian leadership. The sixth (annual) CCAT Consortium Meeting (CCM6) will be held in the Fall at Cornell (CCM5 was held at the University of Toronto).
The CCAT team is very much open to new members. We are especially encouraging new science ideas that we can explore with the amazing survey datasets we will create with FYST. If you have an interest in participating in the technology development or in any of the Key Projects please contact the author of this note, or Norm Murray (a CCAT Director), or a Key Project leader (listed on the website above).