Thursday

The construction of the 4m Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on Haleakala, Maui is progressing on schedule. Operations are scheduled to begin early 2020. Once operational the DKIST will be the world’s largest solar telescope. DKIST was designed to meet the needs of critical high resolution and high sensitivity spectral and polarimetric observations of the sun. DKIST’s superb resolution and polarimetric sensitivity will enable astronomers to unravel many of the mysteries the Sun presents, including the origin of solar magnetism, the mechanisms of coronal heating and drivers of the solar wind, flares, coronal mass ejections and variability in solar output. The design allows DKIST to operate as a coronagraph at infrared wavelengths where the sky background is low and bright coronal emission lines are available. Taking advantage of its large aperture and infrared polarimeters DKIST will be capable to routinely measure the currently illusive coronal magnetic fields. The state-of-the-art adaptive optics system provides diffraction limited imaging and the ability to resolve features approximately 20 km on the Sun. Five first light instruments will be available at the start of operations: Visible Broadband Imager (VBI; National Solar Observatory), Visible SpectroPolarimeter (ViSP; High Altitude Observatory), Visible Tunable Filter (VTF; Kiepenheuer Institute, Germany), Diffraction Limited NIR Spectropolarimeter (DL-NIRSP; University of Hawaii) and the Cryogenic NIRSpectropolarimeter (Cryo-NIRSP; University of Hawaii). The data from these instruments will be distributed to the community via the NSO/DKIST data center. We provide an overview of the facility and discuss the project status.