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A Brazilian bump in the road for E-ELT

January 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In recent years the E-ELT project, Europe’s flagship next-generation optical observatory, seems to have gone from strength to strength: in 2010-2011, ESO Council officially gave the green light to the baseline technical design of the telescope (with the primary mirror slightly reduced in size), several member countries pledged their support for the project, others announced substantial investments into the development of hardware and instrumentation, and crucially, membership fees from giant new member state Brazil looked set to provide a major boost to the project’s financial coffers.

But apparently the E-ELT has hit a snag. This article in Brazilian publication Veja talks about Brazil’s failure to ratify the accession to ESO and support for the E-ELT project because of financial difficulties in 2011. Although an agreement was signed between ESO and the then science minister of Brazil in December 2010, Brazil’s parliament has yet to give its approval. Since then, Brazil’s been through general elections, and the new science minister hasn’t been forthcoming in continuing this approval process.

As Brazil’s contribution to ESO is crucial for the project to go ahead as long as no other new members join, the European members’ governments cannot now commit until Brazil formally comes into the club, and the project has been put on hold. ESO Director-General Tim De Zeeuw made some strong statements to the press about Brazil dragging its feet on the ratification, saying that the current accession conditions cannot be guaranteed beyond mid-2012, and new countries are lines up to join ESO if Brazil drop out. The article lists Australia, Israel, Russia, Poland and Estonia as potential new members.

An awkward point is that following the initial agreement in late 2010, Brazilian astronomers were already given full access to ESO telescope time. If Brazil now fail to ratify their accession, that privilege may be revoked again. That would be a big shame for their observers, who may have already planned multi-semester projects on ESO’s telescopes.

I can imagine that ESO really (really!) don’t want to start having negotiations with new member states at this point, as that’s likely to set the project back even further. Meanwhile the instrumentation community in Europe is working hard to keep the instrumentation projects for the new telescope alive, funded and staffed before getting the go ahead for the next phase of development.  I hope it happens soon!

Thanks to friendly Portuguese colleague Elisabete da Cunha for translating the article.

Image: Swinburne Astronomy Productions/ESO

 

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Honey, I Shrunk The Telescope!

June 16, 2011 By 3 Comments

Rumours had been going round for a while that the European Extremely Large Telescope, ESO‘s next generation optical telescope, might get a bit of a trim in size. This week we finally saw that confirmed: first there was this article by Govert Schilling in ScienceInsider ahead of this week’s meeting of ESO Council, and today ESO itself issued a press release about Council’s endorsement of the new plans.

Instead of 42 metres, the E-ELT primary mirror will now measure 39.3 m. That’s a pretty random number, right? I haven’t seen the plans so I’m not sure exactly what is planned – I hope to see some more details soon. It sounds like the overall optical design will also be tweaked to give a smaller (=faster) f-ratio, which gives a compacter overall design. So the telescope enclosure, which is about the size of a football stadium, can also be reduced in size. With these relatively small modifications, ESO can save quite a bit of the community’s cash – around 200 million euro according to the ScienceInsider piece.

Some additional contributions will however still be required in the years to come from the member states.

I think ESO made a smart decision. It must have been disappointing for many involved to come down from the now iconic 42-m design that huge amounts of work have gone into, both within ESO and in the rest of the community. It will certainly be burned forever into a corner of my brain, after my years of working on METIS. But in the current economic climate it would be hard to get big increases in contributions from its members – I imagine the UK in particular would have entirely incapable of that.

Clever new members Brazil, whose accession to ESO essentially provided the required funds to go ahead with the E-ELT, secured an exemption from these increases. Their involvement signals a pretty exciting time for South American astronomy as well.

The slight but not insignificant reduction in science performance is a reasonable price to pay for keeping the telescope within a realistic budget and timeline – with first light planned for 2022. It’s unclear which of the US-based ELT projects, the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope (such snazzy looking websites!), will see the light and on what timescales, but it’s fair to assume that whatever happens there, ESO will not want the E-ELT to be far behind its US competitor(s).

And, speaking of budgets and timelines, the delay to the launch of James Webb now interestingly means that the ELT’s are likely to be its direct contemporaries, rather than coming online towards the end of JWST’s lifetime. This gives us the mouthwatering prospect of tackling our research questions over a huge parameter space in spatial and spectral resolution and sensitivity – simultaneously!

Construction on the new telescope will start next January. Exciting stuff.

Image: ESO

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E-ELT goes to Chile

April 27, 2010 By

As expected, ESO Council have accepted the recommendation to build the European Extremely Large Telescope at Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes. The decision was announced yesterday with the customary nice words and some cool accompanying imagery, video and a dedicated ESOCast episode, which you can all see here.

Particularly noteworthy is the nod of thanks ESO give to Spain, who were competing with Chile for the chance to to host the telescope. While many European astronomers, especially the Britons who’ve traditionally had the largest foreign presence on the island, have a great big soft spot for La Palma, I think a collective sigh of relief went through the community on hearing the news. La Palma is undoubtedly an excellent observing site, but it’s just not of the same quality as Paranal or Armazones – it’s more humid, has fewer clear nights and is plagued by Saharan sand in its atmosphere.

With this announcement, all three of the ELT-type telescopes  – E-ELT, GMT and TMT – now have a home. Now all they need is money to start building!

Image: ESO/S. Brunier

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Making my software open

April 6, 2010 By

After thinking  about software development in astronomy and talking about it with friends at work and on this blog, I thought it was about time I put my money where my mouth is. I too write software – in fact, the bulk of my work here in Leiden has been based around code I’ve written over the past 2 years for the METIS project (in IDL). The code basically calculates the sensitivity of METIS on the E-ELT, or the minimum flux it will be able to detect at a particular signal to noise (S/N) in a given exposure time over its wavelength range,  in various modes of observation. You can find the full package with background info on my brand-new github page, and a paper is in preparation (to be presented at SPIE 2010) for your referencing pleasure.

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With a little help from our friends: Finding a home for E-ELT

March 4, 2010 By

Cerro Paranal (middle right) and Cerro Armazones (middle left)

ResearchBlogging.orgESO announced today that their Council have recommended Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes as the preferred site for their next generation optical/IR observatory, the 42-m European Extremely Large Telescope. The decision came in response to the delivery of a technical report by the organisation’s E-ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee, from which Armazones emerged as the frontrunner, “because it has the best balance of sky quality across all aspects and it can be operated in an integrated fashion with the existing ESO Paranal Observatory”.

So does this means the deal is done? Apparently not. The text also tells us that ESO have received proposals to host the telescope from both Spain, who would like to see the telescope site on La Palma, and Chile, so a final run-off between these two countries now seems likely.

What has struck me about this whole site selection exercise is the different approaches taken by ESO for the E-ELT and their North American counterparts, the Thirty Meter Telescope project.

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