Hetdex: Virus Instrument

The Visible Integral-field-unit Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS) instrument is made up of 150+ individually compact and identical spectrographs, each fed by a fiber integral-field unit. The instrument provides integral field spectroscopy at wavelengths between 350nm and 550nm of over 33,600 spatial elements per observation, each 1.8 sq. arcsec on the sky, at R 700. The instrument will be fed by a new wide-field corrector (WFC) of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) with increased science field of view as large as 22arcmin diameter and telescope aperture of 10m. This will enable the HETDEX, a large area blind survey of Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies at redshift z < 3.5. The status of VIRUS instrument construction is summarized.