On August 1, 2019, Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC) issued the formal acceptance of the Conceptual Design of GTC-HRS by the Oversight Committee of the NAOC-GRANTECAN 2016 Agreement. It meant the conceptual design proposed by the Chinese collaborative group has succeeded in passing this review.

GTC High-Resolution Ultra-Stable Spectrograph (GTC-HRS) is one of the next generation instruments for GTC. The main science cases of this instrument involve exoplanet detection, stellar chemical abundance, isotopes, and physical constants. The project is jointly proposed by National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology (NIAOT). The conceptual design work is supported by the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ international cooperative projects of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

The conceptual design review was held at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) by the GRANTECAN on June 25-26, 2019. The panel members included Martin M. Roth (Chair) from Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP), Luca Pasquini from European Southern Observatory (ESO) and Walter Seifert from Landessternwarte Heidelberg. While, Jianrong Shi (NAOC), Dong Xiao (NIAOT), Kai Zhang (NIAOT) and Liang Wang (Universit？ts-Sternwarte München) attended the review as the Chinese project delegation. The review was chaired by Romano L.M. Corradi, the Director of GRANTECAN.

At the review, the Chinese project delegation reported the science motivation, instrument conceptual design and project management. After listening carefully to the design report and the answers to the relative questions, the panel members reached a consensus that the science cases presentation is convincing, timely and relevant, and the presented baseline design is the only one that fulfills all of the requirements, considering lessons learned with ESPRESSO and KPF.

The panel submitted the formal report on conceptual design review for the GTC-HRS on July 22. On August 1, the GRANTECAN issued the formal acceptance of the GTC-HRS conceptual design by the Oversight Committee of the NAOC-GRANTECAN 2016 Agreement.

The Chinese collaborative group keeps working on GTC-HRS project in order to join the international community of GTC users. The Chinese astronomers will be entitled to get guaranteed observation time and use any its scientific instruments for cutting-edge science cases.

Group photo of the GTC-HRS conceptual design review