SCUBA-2 is a Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array currently under development for use at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). This new instrument will expand on the success of the existing SCUBA camera and maintain the JCMT at the forefront of world submillimetre astronomy for the next decade. With a much larger field-of-view and sky background limited detectors, SCUBA-2 will be able to map several hundred times faster than SCUBA to the same noise level. All areas of astronomy are expected to benefit: large-scale cosmological surveys of various sizes and depths to probe elliptical galaxy formation, and the star formation history of the Universe. Closer to home, we expect SCUBA-2 to make tremendous advances in studying our own galaxy - particularly in providing a census of local star-formation activity (young protostars and pre-stellar cores - the first stages of star formation).
The Astronomical Instrumentation Group (AIG) is building an imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer for the SCUBA-2 system. The SCUBA-2 FTS system will provide unprecedented spectrocopic measurements of the submillimeter universe.
For more information go to the SCUBA-2 FTS project site