GO-IRS: a new multi-object spectrograph for the GTC

GO-IRS stands for "GTC Optical Intermediate Resolution Spectrograph". It is the answer of a big team of over 100 experienced researchers and engineers from the University of Florida, China and Spain to the recent call for new instrumentation for the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC). The GO-IRS main facts are: 1000 MOS fibres in a 15 arcmin circular field of view; 4x400 IFU fibres in the central 2 arcmin; resolution powers of R=20k, 10k and 5-2k; wavelength coverage from 0.37 to 0.60 mum in the blue channel and from 0.60 to 1.00 mum in the red channel; use of telescope-proof technology (e.g. LAMOST for fibre positioning and data pipeline, MARVELS for spectrograph opto-mechanics and thermal control). The GO-IRS Science Team is developing three design reference cases on near-field cosmology in the Milky Way, kinematics and abundances in galaxies of the Local Group and of the local Universe, and astrophysical properties and clustering of distant galaxies at z=1-4. We open our GO-IRS Science Team to all Spanish astronomers interested in working with us.