Why MAAT at GTC

1. MAAT at GTC provides seeing-limited and wide-band Integral-Field Spectroscopy at low / moderate spectral resolution

              Seeing-limited Integral Field Spectrographs on 10m-class telescopes


2. MAAT at GTC can perform Spectrophotometry

- All photons are collected
- Larger efficiency, thus enhancing the measured S/N


A clear advantage of IFS as compared to long-slit is the fact that all the flux of the object (point sources or extended features inside the IFU F.o.V.) can be collected allowing to perform absolute spectrophotometry and enhancing the S/N.

3. Advantage on bad (any) seeing conditions

MAAT keeps its nominal spectral resolution regardless the seeing conditions. This is a big advantage w.r.t. to the OSIRIS long-slit mode.

4. Prompt to Targets of Opportunity

Note that the main advantage of MAAT is that a broad-band image of the entire 14.20'' x 10'' field could be generated from the 3D data cube, which will confirm the correct target acquisition, but at the same time will guarantee observations of targets whose position is known within an accuracy of few arcsec. This represents another advantage to use MAAT, in particular for transient astrophysics.