Foreseen Changes regarding Paranal Instrumentation and Facilities

UT instruments and facilities

  • CRIRES is taken out of operations as of July 17th, 2014 to undergo a major upgrade to transform it into a cross-dispersed echelle spectrograph. It is expected to be back in operations in 2017.
  • A month-long intervention to improve the reliability of the KMOS arms is expected to take place during the second half of Period 94.
  • It is expected that XSHOOTER will undergo an intervention lasting 3 months in the coming periods during which the instrument will not be available for operations. The main aim of the intervention is to fix the ADC systems.
  • SINFONI may undergo an upgrade during Period 96  - at the same time as the installation of the Deformable Secondary Mirror (see below) -   to replace the  H+K grating by a high-resolution one, to replace the  detector, and to modify its fore-optics, in prevision of its later insertion into ERIS.
  • Pending successfull commissioning, it is expected that the 2nd generation instrument SPHERE will be offered in Period 95.

Activities related to the installation of the Adaptive Optics Facility on UT4 (Yepun)

  • The installation of the 4 Laser Guide Stars Facility (4LGSF) is expected to take place late in Period 94 and during Period 95.
  • The installation of GRAAL, the adaptive optics module for HAWK-I, is expected to take place on Nasmyth A during Period 95.
  • GALACSI, the adaptive optics module for MUSE, is expected to be installed on Nasmyth B during the 2nd half of 2015.
  • The installation of the Deformable Secondary Mirror and re-commissioning of the telescope is expected to take place during Period 96 (early 2016); as a consequence, UT4 will not be available during approximately 2 months.
  • The commissioning of the AOF and AOF-related systems is expected to require monthly slots of up to 7 days during possibly 2 years.

VLTI instruments and facilites

  • It is expected that MIDI and the VLTI Visitor Instrument focus will not be available past Period 94.
  • However, a project has started to integrate PIONIER as an ESO facility instrument.