Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE): systems engineering management for a massively multiplexed spectroscopic survey facility

MSE is an upgrade of the existing 3.6-m Canada France Hawaii Telescope to an 11.25-m segmented primary mirror with a 1.5 square degrees field-of-view at the telescope’s prime focus. MSE will be massively multiplexed, observing 4,332 astronomical targets in every pointing. There are several subsystems needed to accomplish this. At MSE’s prime focus, a hexapod supports and positions several subsystems, including a wide field corrector barrel, a field derotator, guide and phasing cameras and a system of fiber optics with their individual piezo-actuated positioners. The fiber optics transmit light to two banks of low/moderate and high resolution spectrographs in optical to near-infrared wavelengths, several meters away. An array of primary mirror segments and several spectrographs are supported by the telescope structure as well. All of these subsystems are being designed and built by various partners and contributors around the world. Integration and compliance to requirements will require careful planning. To ensure this is successful, MSE has developed a plan for consistently flowing and tracking the many requirements from the Observatory Requirements into its subsystems. This involves reviewing subsystem design requirements that were developed in the conceptual design phase and updating them based on recent changes in the Observatory Requirements. Also, internal interfaces have been identified and will be closely controlled to ensure consistency throughout the project. This also involves consideration of several other topics related to requirements development and maintenance through the lifecycle of the project. We present an overview of the systems engineering management plans that will ensure consistency and traceability of requirements to science cases and stakeholder needs, as well as anticipating the verification process in the future work.