The Canada France Hawaii Telescope Corporation (CFHT) plans to repurpose its observatory on the summit of Maunakea and operate a new wide field spectroscopic survey telescope, the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE). MSE will upgrade the observatory with a larger 11.25m aperture telescope and equip it with dedicated instrumentation to capitalize on the site, which has some of the best seeing in the northern hemisphere, and offer its user's community the ability to do transformative science. The knowledge and experience of the current CFHT staff will contribute greatly to the engineering of this new facility. MSE will reuse the same building and telescope pier as CFHT. However, it will be necessary to upgrade the support pier to accommodate a bigger telescope and replace the current dome since a wider slit opening of 12.5 meters in diameter is needed. Once the project is completed the new facility will be almost indistinguishable on the outside from the current CFHT observatory. MSE will build upon CFHT's pioneering work in remote operations, with no staff at the observatory during the night, and use modern technologies to reduce daytime maintenance work. This paper describes the design approach for redeveloping the CFHT facility for MSE including the infrastructure and equipment considerations required to support and facilitate nighttime observations. The building will be designed so existing equipment and infrastructure can be reused wherever possible while meeting new requirement demands. Past experience and lessons learned will be used to create a modern, optimized, and logical layout of the facility. The purpose of this paper is to provide information to readers involved in the MSE project or organizations involved with the redevelopment of an existing observatory facility for a new mission.

The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) project has completed its Conceptual Design Phase. This paper is a status report of the MSE project regarding its technical and programmatic progress. The technical status includes its conceptual design and system performance, and highlights findings and recommendations from the System and various subsystems design reviews. The programmatic status includes the project organization and management plan for the Preliminary Design Phase. In addition, this paper provides the latest information related to the permitting process for Maunakea construction.

By collecting metrics in fleet operations, data center usage, employee air travel and facilities consumption at the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, the collective impact of CFHT and other observatories on the Maunakea Astronomy Precinct can be estimated. An audit of carbon emissions in these aspects as well as specific efficiency metrics such as data center Power Use Efficiency gives a general scale of environmental and social alterations. Applications of the audit would be for such things as crafting sustainability strategies.

The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer is designed to be the largest non-ELT optical/NIR astronomical telescope, and will be a fully dedicated facility for multi-object spectroscopy over a broad range of spectral resolutions. The MSE design has progressed from feasibility concept into its current baseline design where the system configuration of main systems such as telescope, enclosure, summit facilities and instrument are fully defined. This paper will describe the engineering development of the main systems, and discuss the trade studies to determine the optimal telescope and multiplexing designs and how their findings are incorporated in the current baseline design.

The Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope Corporation (CFHT) plans to repurpose its observatory on the summit of Maunakea and operate a (60 segment) 11.25m aperture wide field spectroscopic survey telescope, the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE). The prime focus telescope will be equipped with dedicated instrumentation to take advantage of one of the best sites in the northern hemisphere and offer its users the ability to perform large surveys. Central themes of the development plan are reusing and upgrading wherever possible. MSE will reuse the CFHT site and build upon the existing observatory infrastructure, using the same building and telescope pier as CFHT, while minimizing environmental impact on the summit. MSE will require structural support upgrades to the building to meet the latest building seismic code requirements and accommodate a new larger telescope and upgraded enclosure. It will be necessary to replace the current dome since a larger slit opening is needed for a larger telescope. MSE will use a thermal management system to remove heat generated by loads from the building, flush excess heat from lower levels, and maintain the observing environment temperature. This paper describes the design approach for redeveloping the CFHT facility for MSE. Once the project is completed the new facility will be almost indistinguishable on the outside from the current CFHT observatory. Past experience and lessons learned from CFHT staff and the astronomical community will be used to create a modern, optimized, and transformative scientific data collecting machine.

This short document is intended as a companion and introduction to the Detailed Science Case (DSC) for the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer. It provides a concise summary of the essential characteristics of MSE from the perspective of the international astronomical community. MSE is a wide field telescope (1.5 square degree field of view) with an aperture of 11.25m. It is dedicated to multi-object spectroscopy at several different spectral resolutions in the range R ~ 2500 - 40000 over a broad wavelength range (0.36 - 1.8μm). MSE will enable transformational science in areas as diverse as exoplanetary host characterization; stellar monitoring campaigns; tomographic mapping of the interstellar and intergalactic media; the in-situ chemical tagging of the distant Galaxy; connecting galaxies to the large scale structure of the Universe; measuring the mass functions of cold dark matter sub-halos in galaxy and cluster-scale hosts; reverberation mapping of supermassive black holes in quasars. MSE is the largest ground based optical and near infrared telescope in its class, and it will occupy a unique and critical role in the emerging network of astronomical facilities active in the 2020s. MSE is an essential follow-up facility to current and next generations of multi-wavelength imaging surveys, including LSST, Gaia, Euclid, eROSITA, SKA, and WFIRST, and is an ideal feeder facility for E-ELT, TMT and GMT.

CFHT's decision to move away from classical observing prompted the development of a remote observing environment aimed at producing science observations from headquarters facility in Waimea, HI. This remote observing project commonly referred to as the Observatory Automation Project (OAP) was completed at the end of January 2011 and has been providing the majority of science data ever since.A comprehensive feasibility study was conducted to determine the options available to achieve remote operations of the observatory dome drive system. After evaluation, the best option was to upgrade the original hydraulic system to utilize variable frequency drive (VFD) technology.The project upgraded the hydraulic drive system, which initially utilized a hydraulic power unit and three (3) identical drive units to rotate the dome. The new electric drive system replaced the hydraulic power unit with electric motor controllers, and each drive unit reuses the original drive and swaps one for one the original hydraulic motors with an an electric motor. The motor controllers provide status and monitoring parameters for each drive unit which convey the functionality and health of the system. This paper will discuss the design upgrades to the dome drive rotation system, as well as some benefits, control, energy savings, and monitoring.

The Canada France Hawaii Telescope operates a 3.6m Optical/Infrared telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea. As an effort to improve delivered image quality in a cost-effective manner, a dome venting project was initiated to eliminate local contributions to 'seeing' that exist along the optical path and arise to a large extent due to temperature gradients throughout the dome volume. The quality of images delivered by the telescope is adversely affected by variations in air temperature within the telescope dome. Air temperature differences are caused by the air’s contact with large structures. They are different from ambient as a result of their large thermal inertias and the consequent inability of these structures to follow rapid air temperature changes. The dome venting project is an effort to add a series of large openings, “vents”, in the skin of the dome with the purpose of allowing free stream summit winds to flush out “stagnant air”. The term, “stagnant air”, applies to thermally mixed air from the inside of the dome environment that, for one reason or another, has been heated or cooled by surfaces in the dome environment. The addition of vents to the CFHT dome is intended to facilitate the passive flushing of interior air by the local wind, thereby greatly reducing air temperature variations, a process that has been successfully demonstrated to improve image quality at other telescope facilities and supported by recent water tunnel tests conducted by CFHT staff.

The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE; formerly Next Generation Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope) is a dedicated, 10m aperture, wide-field, fiber-fed multi-object spectroscopic facility proposed as an upgrade to the existing Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea. The enclosure vent configuration design study is the last of three studies to examine the technical feasibility of the proposed MSE baseline concept. The enclosure vent configuration study compares the aero-thermal performance of three enclosure ventilation configurations based on the predicted dome thermal seeing and air flow attenuation over the enclosure aperture opening of a Calotte design derived from computational fluid dynamics simulations. In addition, functional and operation considerations such as access and servicing of the three ventilation configurations is discussed.

The Next Generation Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope is a dedicated, 10m aperture, wide-field, fiber-fed multiobject spectroscopic facility proposed as an upgrade to the existing Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea. The Next Generation Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope baseline concept assumes the new facility is built on the existing Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope telescope pier and enclosure pier and occupies the same three dimensional exterior “footprint”. Three technical studies have been planned to examine the validity of these assumptions. The technical studies are executed in series as they represent technical decision points in a logical sequence. The three technical studies in succession are: 1. Telescope Pier Study – Load Capacity and Structural Interface, 2. Enclosure Fixed Base Study – Telescope and Enclosure Configuration and Load Capacity and 3. Aero- Thermal Study – Dome Thermal Seeing and Air Flow Attenuation over the Enclosure Aperture Opening. The paper outlines the baseline facility (telescope, spectrograph and enclosure) concept and the status of these studies, and discusses the proposed telescope and enclosure configuration in terms of the redevelopment assumptions. A consolidated feasibility study report will be submitted to the CFHT Board and Science Advisory Committee in the Fall of 2012, with first light for the facility aiming to be in the early 2020s.

The 'Imaka project is a high-resolution wide-field imager proposed for the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT) on Mauna Kea. 'Imaka takes advantage of two features of the optical turbulence above Mauna Kea: weak optical turbulence in the free-atmosphere and boundary layer turbulence which is highly confined within a surface layer tens of meters thick and or the telescope enclosures. The combination of the two allows a groundlayer adaptive optics system (GLAO) to routinely deliver an extremely-wide corrected field of view of one-degree at an excellent free-atmosphere seeing limit at visible wavelengths. In addition, populating the focal-plane with orthogonal-transfer CCDs provides a second level of image improvement on the free-atmosphere seeing and the residual GLAO correction. The impact of such an instrument covers a broad range of science and is a natural progression of CFHT's wide-field expertise.