The GHOST project commissioning has begun, with the Canadian and Australian teams able to travel to the summit following the easing of COVID-19 related restrictions. Optical bench assembly has begun, with alignment tests scheduled for late April. Twilight tests are to take place in mid-May. On-sky science commissioning is planned to take place in mid-late June, 2022. 

The GHOST project continues to be on hold due to the pandemic and we do not expect to start the re-assembly and test of the instrument at Cerro Pachon this year.  We are hopeful that the travel restrictions will ease in the first half of 2022 so this work can begin. In the meantime, we continue to make incremental improvements to our software and documentation, and order spare parts.

The project has been effectively on hold since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the exception being progress on software and documentation. With the reopening of the Gemini South telescope, staff is now available to move the 3 containers from the base facility to be unloaded at the summit for storage until the remainder of the GHOST parts arrive.  We expect the project to take another four months to complete once the Australian and Canadian crews are able to travel to Chile for the reassembly and test of GHOST at Cerro Pachón.

In January, comprehensive testing of the spectrograph subsystems was completed yielding excellent results, e.g.

The northern hemisphere autumn saw multiple team members travel from Australia, Chile, and Hawai’i to converge on Victoria, British Columbia, at the NRC-H labs, to witness the completion of the spectrograph final assembly, and initiate acceptance testing. The Australian team bought along their science fiber optical cable and the slit viewer subassembly to be matched with the bench spectrograph for the testing.

Bonding and mounting of the GHOST optics is well underway at the National Research Council of Canada, and both blue 4k × 4k and red 6k × 6k science detectors are assembled into their cryostats, ready to be tested.

Arriving at Gemini South is the first part of our new instrument "GHOST".  The instrument consists of a unit mounted in the Instrument Support Structure in charge of 'capturing' the light of the telescope.  The spectrograph will be installed in the pierlab connected by over 80 feet (24 m) of cable.

The build of the GHOST Cassegrain unit is nearly complete. In November, Gemini staff participated in weighing and inspecting the fully assembled unit at Australian Astronomical Optics (AAO) at Macquarie University lab in North Ryde, New South Wales. The unit is currently on its way to Chile. In December, Gemini representatives spent a week at the AAO testing the Integral Filed Unit (IFU) positioner and verifying the assembly and operation of the electronics and software of the Cassegrain Unit.