Terry Jones     

The IRTF, with its equatorial mount and cassegrain focus, is an ideal
platform for high precision polarimetry at infrared wavelengths. With
an adaptive optics secondary and no off-axis reflections, high spatial
resolution imaging polarimetry with a minimum of instrumental effects
can be easily achieved. Polarimetry science includes the study of
protoplanetary and debris disks, dust shells around evolved stars, AGN
and their environments, lensed quasars, observations of exoplanets in
reflected light, and much more. It is important to keep a polarimetric
capability in mind when proposing and designing new instrumentation
for the IRTF, rather than finding out after fabrication that
polarimetry has been rendered impossible.