2dF grows up: Echidna for the AAT

Abstract

We present the concept design of a new fibre positioner and spectrograph system for the Anglo-Australian Telescope, as a proposed enhancement to the Anglo-Australian Observatory's well-known 2dF facility. A four-fold multiplex enhancement is accomplished by replacing the 400-fibre 2dF fibre positioning robot with a 1600-fibre Echidna unit, feeding three clones of the AAOmega optical spectrograph. Such a facility has the capability of a redshift 1 survey of a large fraction of the southern sky, collecting five to ten thousand spectra per night for a million-galaxy survey.