Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 November 2008
We are exploring instrumental concepts of Near and Mid InfraRed (NIR, MIR) wide field camera-spectrographs for a 2 m-class telescope at Antarctica. Scientific drivers are star formation and very low mass objects. Both concepts pretend to exploit the unique features of Dome C: superb seeing, low temperature, improved IR transmission and reduced sky background. Two preliminary concepts are presented here. The NIR instrument would cover the wavelength range 0.97–5.0 μm and would be optimized for the K,L and M bands. The MIR instrument would observe in the range 7–30 μm and would be specifically designed to exploit the extended portion of the Q window (20+ μm).