Instrument Development

ESO's mission is to provide its astronomical community with worldwide competitive ground-based observing capabilities to probe the Universe from its first billion year to the present time. This requires developing, installing and operating state of the art telescopes, with comprehensive instrument suites, on excellent astronomical sites. The ESO community is deeply involved in the development of instruments and telescope systems for the ESO observatories, with nearly all such projects actually pursued through collaborations between research institutes in the ESO member states and ESO.

These developments are organised and managed by the Instrumentation Division (INS) located at ESO's Garching Headquarters. INS also hosts the Instrumentation Project Office of the E-ELT.

Inhouse development

The following operational instruments have been built under the complete responsibility of ESO:

Development together with external consortia

Together with external consortia ESO was responsible for the definition and contributed to the design, construction and implementation at the observatories of the following instruments and facilities:

A special case is the Visitor Focus on VLT-Antu (UT1), which is reserved for visitor instruments to permit innovative observations by instrument teams using their own stand-alone instruments.

What else?

Interfaces: One crucial aspect of instrument building is to make sure that they work properly with the telescope(s) for which they are designed. For this purpose ESO exercises strict control over the interfaces between the VLT observatory and its instruments. The detailed requirements on VLT instruments are available online.

Instrument upgrades: Upgrades keep the instruments competitive and may be proposed from outside or inside ESO.

At the ESO Headquarters in Garching activities related to instruments and similar facilities are distributed over the following departments:

The Instrumentation Project Department (IPD): IPD is responsible for the development of instruments in-house and for the follow-up of instruments developed by external consortia (both optical and infrared).

Optical Detector Team (ODT): ODT is responsible for all activities concerning scientific optical detectors (presently only CCDs) and their VLT standard control electronics (FIERA). Basically all scientific optical detector systems for ESO instruments are delivered by ODT.

Infrared Detector Department: IDD is responsible for developing most of the IR detector systems and the IRACE detector controller. Together with ODT it is developing the New General detector Controller (NGC).

Integration and Cryovacuum: This department plays a crucial role in the construction of ESO-built instruments. Instrument subsystems are thoroughly tested in its assembly hall, integrated into complete instruments, again tested until they are declared ready for installation at the telescope. In addition, the Integration Department assembles and tests all detector cryostats for optical and IR instruments and provides some cryogenics and integration support for externally developed instruments.

Adaptive Optics (AO): The AO Department is responsible for all ESO adaptive optics systems, whether built in-house or by external consortia. In parallel, it conducts a major R&D programme in conjunction with our community, in particular with the goal of an expanding standard toolkit for the AO systems.