GRAVITY is the second generation Very Large Telescope Interferometer instrument for precision narrow-angle astrometry and interferometric imaging in the Near Infra-Red (NIR). It shall provide precision astrometry of order 10 microarcseconds, and imaging capability at a few milliarcsecond resolution, and hence will revolutionise dynamical measurements of celestial objects. GRAVITY is currently in the last stages of its integration and tests in Garching at MPE, and will be delivered to the VLT Interferometer (VLTI) in 2015. We present here the instrument, with a particular focus on the components making use of fibres: integrated optics beam combiners, polarisation rotators, fibre differential delay lines, and the metrology.
@article{arxiv.1503.07303,
title = {GRAVITY: the VLTI 4-beam combiner for narrow-angle astrometry and interferometric imaging},
author = {N. Blind and F. Eisenhauer and S. Gillessen and Y. Kok and M. Lippa and G. Perrin and R. Dembet and P. Fedou and S. Lacour and K. Perraut and L. Jocou and L. Burtscher and O. Hans and M. Haug and F. Haussmann and S. Huber and A. Janssen and S. Kellner and T. Ott and O. Pfuhl and E. Sturm and J. Weber and E. Wieprecht and A. Amorim and W. Brandner and C. Straubmeier},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.07303},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
8 pages, 3 figures. Proceeding of the conference "Fiber optics in astronomy IV". The follwoing authors made significant contribution regarding the work on fibers reported in this paper (ordered by institute and alphabetical order): IPAG: L. Jocou, K. Perraut; LESIA: R. Dembet, P. Fedou, S. Lacour, G. Perrin; MPE: N. Blind, F. Eisenhauer, S. Gillessen,, Y. Kok, M. Lippa