To the ARC user community, As previously discussed, APO is interested in getting a new IR instrument. Several possibilities have recently surfaced. One of these is an instrument called RIVMOS (Rapid Infra-red and Visible Multi-Object Spectrograph), which is being built by a team at GSFC led by Harvey Moseley and including Alexander Kutynev, Bruce Woodgate, and Jian Ge (Penn State); they are building this with funding from NGST for a prototype instrument to demonstrate the capabilities of a microshutter array, to be potentially used for fully configurable multi-object spectroscopy. The basic instrument would have both imaging and spectroscopic modes, using a 1024x1024 InSb detector. The current message is to point interested users towards more details at http://loki.apo.nmsu.edu/3.5m/rivmos for the purpose of determining how much interest there is in such an instrument and also to solicit suggestsion for the technical specifications for the instrument (filters, spectral resolution, etc. etc.); there may still be time to refine some aspects of the design. Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, etc. Jon Holtzman APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 508 in the apo35-general archive. You can find APO the archive on http://www.astro.princeton.edu/APO/apo35-general/INDEX.html APO To join/leave the list, send mail to apo35-request@astro.princeton.edu APO To post a message, mail it to apo35-general@astro.princeton.edu APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO