FRIDA (inFRared Imager and Dissector for Adaptive optics) will be an integral field spectrograph (near infrared) with imaging capability for use with the adaptive optics system of the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC). The instrument will work at very high spatial resolution (up to 0.01") and a range of spectral resolutions up to 30,000. Its integral field unit will be based on an image slicer system using mirrors and will have several cameras for obtaining specific spatial scales, a large number of filters and 3 diffraction gratings optimised for defined bands and spectral resolutions.

FRIDA will use the HAWAII-2 infrared detector, which is designed to work in the near infrared with a format of 2048x2048 pixels. The detector has a control system which has recently been developed and used for the EMIR instrument by the IAC project team. FRIDA will be the first GTC instrument to use the telescope's adaptive optics system.

The FRIDA project is being led by the Instituto de Astronomía de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), with collaboration from the University of Florida (USA), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) and the Centro de Ingeniería y Desarrollo Industrial (CIDESI, Mexico). The IAC is responsible for systems engineering, technology transfer through the development of subsystem prototypes, global coordination of the Control System and in particular the detector control system, the data acquisition system, coordinated operations and management tools for observations (in collaboration with LAOMP).