[8/8] I want to end with this message from my old slides: "We are building it". A reminder: the U.S. P5 report supports the R&D of a "Spec-S5" project for a next-gen spectroscopic survey facility. MUST is a similar "Spec-S5" class project. And, we are building it, right now!
[7/N] Another focus of 2024 will be the design of MUST's spectrograph. We will need 30 of them eventually! On this end, we need all the help we can get, from official collaborators to vendors, advisors, and even just some "good samaritans". Please reach out if you are interested!
[6/N] Also, due to the pandemic, the first light of our 65-cm "mini-MUST" prototype has been delayed. But we should be on track this year and put this little purple telescope on the 4,200-m peak to help us monitor the sky. It will be an essential rehearsal for the real MUST!
[5/N] Another highlight of 2024 will be the construction of MUST's assembly workshop in Jiangyin (江阴). We are really grateful for the strong support from Jiangyin's local government. We hope to invite more people over to this beautiful town and check out our telescope!
[4/N] Next we move to design a highly modular focal plane assembly to host 20,000 fiber positioners. Again, our collaborator EPFL has been monumental on this part! We also have a secret "Project Pizza" going on. Hope we can share more updates soon 🍕🍕🍕
[3/N] As the 1st 6-m class telescope built in China, it was tough to design! So much to learn for all of us! But we are lucky to have a dedicated, ambitious, young team and many excellent domestic & international collaborators, we believe we are getting quite close!
[2/N] Thanks for all the hard work put in by the folks at the Arizona MirrorLab, the construction of our 6.5-m primary mirror has been going smoothly and on schedule. Checking out the mirror in April was really my highlight of 2023!
[1/N] Today we had the annual summary meeting for the MUltiplexed Survey Telescope (MUST) project. It has been a very challenging year, but nothing beats the excitement of seeing the design of a real 6.5-m telescope. It was a great learning experience for me!
We also had Dr. @Yuhan__Yao visit us and give us a really nice talk about tidal disruption events. Yuhan convinced us that TDE could be a fantastic lab to study a wide range of topics. We hope our MUST spectroscopic survey telescope could do something about it in the 2030s.
Last week, we had Prof. Siyi Feng from Xiamen University, my NJU classmate, introduce astrochemistry in the dense star-forming environment and her ALMA project called "MIAO"... I don't know the full name, but it is very easy to remember: it sounds like "Meow", but in Chinese.
