Related papers: Smart Focal Plane Technologies for VLT Instruments

The PHOT (Portable High-Speed Occultation Telescope) systems were developed for the specific purpose of observing stellar occultations by solar system objects. Stellar occultations have unique observing constraints: they may only be…

A way to fully exploit the large collecting area of modern 8-10m class telescopes is high resolution spectroscopy. Many astrophysical problems from planetary science to cosmology benefit from spectroscopic observations at the highest…

OPTICON, the ICN Optical Infrared Coordination Network for Astronomy, brings together for the first time the operators of all Europe's medium to large optical-infrared telescopes, the largest corresponding data archives, and several user…

The future Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will consist of several tens of telescopes of different mirror sizes. CTA will provide next generation sensitivity to very high energy photons from few tens of GeV to >100 TeV. Several focal plane…

The forthcoming Extremely Large Telescopes all require adaptive optics systems for their successful operation. The real-time control for these systems becomes computationally challenging, in part limited by the memory bandwidths required…

We summarize the scientific potential of high contrast optical space imaging for studies of extrasolar planets, debris disks, and planet formation. The unique scientific capabilities offered by a 2-m class optical telescope, the technical…

The Planetary Camera and Spectrograph (PCS) for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will be dedicated to detecting and characterising nearby exoplanets with sizes from sub-Neptune to Earth-size in the neighbourhood of the Sun. This goal is…

Observatory end-to-end science operations is the overall process starting with a scientific question, represented by a proposal requesting observing time, and ending with the analysis of observation data addressing that question, and…

SPHERE is an instrument designed and built by a consortium of French, German, Italian, Swiss and Dutch institutes in collaboration with ESO. The project is currently in its Phase B. The main goal of SPHERE is to gain at least one order of…

The Liverpool Telescope is one of the world's premier facilities for time domain astronomy. The time domain landscape is set to radically change in the coming decade, with surveys such as LSST providing huge numbers of transient detections…

Multiplexed surveys have the ambition to grow larger for the next generation of focal plane instruments. Future projects such as Spec-S5, MUST, and WST have an ever-growing need for multi-object spectroscopy (13,000 - 20,000 simultaneous…

To build upon the goals of the upcoming INTEGRAL mission, the next generation soft gamma-ray (0.2-20 MeV) observatory will require improved sensitivity to nuclear line emission while maintaining high spectral resolution. We present the…

The Virtual Telescope for X-Ray Observations (VTXO) is a conceptual mission under development to demonstrate a new instrument for astronomical observations in the X-ray band using a set of 6U CubeSats. VTXO will use a Phase Fresnel Lens,…

Observations of circumstellar environments to look for the direct signal of exoplanets and the scattered light from disks has significant instrumental implications. In the past 15 years, major developments in adaptive optics, coronagraphy,…

The Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (SCT) is a proposal for the Medium Size Telescopes of the Cherenkov Telescope Array. Its concept is based on a two-mirror optical system designed to improve the telescope field of view and image resolution…

Due to its simultaneous deep imaging and integral field spectroscopic capability, an Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrograph (IFTS) is ideally suited to the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) mission, and offers opportunities for…

The European Solar Telescope (EST) is a project aimed at studying the magnetic connectivity of the solar atmosphere, from the deep photosphere to the upper chromosphere. Its design combines the knowledge and expertise gathered by the…

The coming years will see routine use of solar data of unprecedented spatial and spectral resolution, time cadence, and completeness in the wavelength domain. To capitalize on the soon to be available radio facilities such as the expanded…

Large astronomical instruments using tens to hundreds of optical or infrared science detectors pose specific challenges for detector control, where, in addition to performance, other engineering aspects like scalability, power consumption,…

We describe a concept for an imaging spectrograph for a large orbiting observatory such as NASA's proposed Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) based on an imaging Fourier transform spectrograph (IFTS). An IFTS has several important…