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Session 75 - 2MASS.
Display session, Wednesday, January 17
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
The Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) project will construct telescopes and cameras which will be dedicated entirely to the task of surveying the infrared sky. The survey facilities will be located at Mt. Hopkins and Cerro Tololo. Each site will support a 1.3m equatorial telescope equipped with a three-band infrared camera.
The two 1.3m telescopes will be of a classical Cassegrain configuration with an f/2 primary and a Cassegrain focal ratio of f/13.5. Each telescope will be equipped with a scanning secondary mirror which will tilt to freeze the focal plane for 1.3s intervals while the telescope scans steadily in declination.
The two survey cameras will each contain three NICMOS3 (256x256 HgCdTe) arrays. All three arrays will view the same region of the sky simultaneously via dichroic mirrors at a scale of 2.0^\prime\prime/pixel. The optics for these cameras are based heavily on a seven-element design implemented in the 2MASS prototype camera and demonstrated extensively at the KPNO 50'' telescope. Each camera contains degrees of freedom to assure a common boresite, focus, rotation, and pupil placement for the three bands. The optical and detector assembly is housed in an all-aluminum dewar with an annular cryogen reservoir having an LN_2 capacity of 5.5 liters. In operation the camera dewars have no moving parts with the exception of a cold shutter.
