The E-ELT instrument roadmap: a status report

Abstract

We present the status of the instrumentation programme for the European Extremely Large Telescope. The instrumentation planning is governed by the E-ELT Instrument Roadmap, which synthesises the scientific, technical and managerial influences on the instrument programme into a staged development plan. Preparations for the start of the design and build phases of the first light instruments and their adaptive optics systems are well underway and are summarised here. In parallel, the process for development of the next three instruments has begun. Recent work on the instrument interface to the telescope is described.

Detector developments at ESO to prepare for the E-ELT era

“…The instrumentation roadmap [2] for the E-ELT outlines the plan for the selection and development of instruments for the telescope. The instruments selected for first light are a near-infrared camera operating from 0.8-2.5 µm and an integral field spectrograph with wavelength coverage from ~0.4-2.4 µm.…”

“…The instruments selected for first light are a near-infrared camera operating from 0.8-2.5 µm and an integral field spectrograph with wavelength coverage from ~0.4-2.4 µm. The camera, MICADO [2] , is designed to exploit the diffraction limit of the 39-m telescope and has 4mas sampling over a ~1 arcminute x 1 arcminute field. The demand for near-infrared sensitive pixels is therefore very high.…”

“…A list of the scientific detectors that match the as-currently-understood requirements of the instruments on the instrument roadmap [2] for the E-ELT has been compiled and is presented in section 2. This is then followed by specific developments.…”

Novel gratings for astronomical observations

“…The echelle spectrograph in which spectrum is folded on to a photographic plate or a 2-dimensional imaging detector, combines a high-order diffraction grating with a prism or a diffraction grating with low angular dispersion as a cross disperser. In the reasons, a transmission grating of echelle type with large angular dispersion and with high diffraction efficiency is required for an astronomical spectrograph of a large telescope such as the TMT (Thirty Meter telescope), the 8.2m Subaru Telescope [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Propagation of incident beam in SR transmission grating with sawtooth shape ridges (left), diffraction efficiency versus lattice period normalized by peek wavelength (middle) [2,7,8] and grisms (direct vision grating) for FOCAS (right).…”

An approach using deep learning for tomographic reconstruction in solar observation

“…10-meter class telescopes have been widely used during last decades to observe different phenomena that happens millions of kilometers away from our planet. Traditionally, these telescopes were used during night observations, and have been growing until achieving sizes of several tens of meters, like the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) [1]. However, the observation of the sun, especially in the optic spectrum, have gained a lot of interest during the last years [2].…”