Anyone considering future instruments, either visitor or facility, should contact LDT Scientist Stephen Levine (sel at lowell dot edu) and their institute representative on the Instrument Advisory Committee as early in the process as possible to discuss technical and scheduling issues. If you are considering a proposal to bring an instrument to LDT and need a letter of support from Lowell Observatory, please contact us as far ahead of the deadline as possible. In addition, all proposals for new instrumentation at LDT need to be reviewed by the LDT Instrument Advisory Committee (check within your department to find out who your representative is).
Future potential instrument mounting locations
Currently LDT only supports instruments on the 5 ports of the Cassegrain instrument cube. However, with additional development the telescope could support instruments at other mounting points.
The top end was designed to be able to support swapping the secondary mirror for a large wide-field instrument, such as an imager or multi-object spectrograph.
A tertiary mirror could be designed and installed to feed the two Nasmyth ports for larger instruments and up to six bent-Cassegrain ports for smaller instruments. Developing the tertiary mirror requires significant additional design work and the budget for the design and construction is unknown. Additionally, each of these ports would require its own guider, wavefront sensor, and rotator capabilities (these functions are built into the Cassegrain instrument cube).