Instrumentation for E-ELT

Infrastructure: Förberedelser för instrumentering till E-ELT
Project title: Instrumentation for E-ELT
Main applicant: Göran Östlin, Stockholm University
Fellow applicant: Nikolai Piskunov, division of Astronomy and Space Physics
Funder: Research infrastructures of national interest from the Swedish Research Council

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is Europe’s major organization for observational astronomy and the world’s most productive astronomical observatory. Sweden was one of the founding members of ESO in 1962. Currently ESO runs the Very Large Telescope (four 8.2 m telescopes in Chile) and is part of the ALMA project. ESO’s next ambitious project is to build the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) with a collecting area 20 times larger & a spatial resolution 5 times better than the existing telescopes.

Apart from the telescope infrastructure, six scientific instruments are in development to make the telescope the most powerful telescope ever built. Large European wide consortia in collaboration with ESO build these instruments. Sweden is a member of the instrument consortia of two instruments (HIRES and MOSAIC). In return for delivering the instrument, ESO provide guaranteed observing nights as well as the possibility to design public surveys.

Both instruments are expected to be real workhorses on the telescope, providing new insights ranging from the characterization of exoplanets, Galactic archaeology as well as galaxy evolution & the detection of the first galaxies. In this application, we request a contribution to be an active member of the instrument consortia in particular focusing on the development of the data reduction pipelines and the design of the public surveys. In addition, we request a financial contribution to provide hardware to the instrument.