SCUBA-2: The submillimeter mapping machine

Submillinieter astronomy was brought out of the dark ages and revolutionized by a single instrument: SCUBA. The range of discoveries, from the SCUBA galaxies through the evolutionary sequence of the star formation process to debris disks surrounding nearby stars, has meant that SCUBA is arguably the most successful ground-based instrument ever built. After eight years of pioneering work on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea., SCUBA was decommissioned in September 2005 to make way for its successor, SCUBA-2. Like SCUBA, SCUBA-2 is a dual-waveband camera working at the two wavelengths of 850 and 450 mu m. As SCUBA brought a 1000-fold increase in mapping speed over a single pixel detector, SCUBA-2 will bring another factor of 1000 to bear in its mission of a submillimeter mapping machine, with over 10,000 pixels in both arrays. SCUBA-2 will reach the confusion limit at 850 tan in about an hour, enabling confusion-limited surveys of large sections of the sky to be undertaken efficiently for the first time at these sulunillinleter wavelengths. SCUBA-2 is a high-risk, high-reward international venture, costing some $20 million; it is currently undergoing verification testing in the labs at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, Edinburgh, and will be delivered to the JCMT in autumn of 2006. SCUBA-2 is a major technology project and involves key partners at NIST (Boulder, USA) and the Universities of British Columbia (Canada), Waterloo (Canada), Cardiff (Wales), and Edinburgh (Scotland).