The SDSS-V local volume mapper fiber cable system

Abstract

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey V (SDSS-V) is an all-sky spectroscopic survey of >6 million objects, designed to decode the history of the Milky Way, reveal the inner workings of stars, investigate the origin of solar systems, and track the growth of supermassive black holes across the Universe. The Local Volume Mapper (LVM) is a facility designed to provide a contiguous 2500 deg2 integral-field survey over a 3.5 year period from Las Campanas Observatory (LCO) in Chile. The facility comprises four small (16 cm) telescopes that deliver science, calibration, and spectro-photometric light to three bench-mounted multi-object spectrographs, designed and build by Winlight Systems. All four telescopes will be equipped with a microlens array integral-field unit (IFU) to slice the focal plane into 35–arcsec large spatial elements while maintaining near-telecentric coupling at the fiber input. The science IFU comprises 1801 fibers, additional 143 fibers are allocated for sky-background and spectro-photometric calibration, totaling 1944 fibers. Each spectrograph will be fed by 648 fibers, which are reformatted into a linear array, forming the entrance slit. In this paper, we present the opto-mechanical design of the LVM-LCO fiber cable system.