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The Vlt Survey Telescope (Vst) Is Now a Few Months from Its Completion

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The Vlt Survey Telescope (Vst) Is Now a Few Months from Its Completion TTHEHE VLVLTT SSURURVEYVEY TTELESCOPEELESCOPE:: AA SSTTAATUSTUS RREPOREPORTT THE VLT SURVEY TELESCOPE (VST) IS NOW A FEW MONTHS FROM ITS COMPLETION. THIS PAPER BRIEFLY REVIEWS THE PROJECT, ACCOUNTS FOR ITS CURRENT STATUS, ANTICIPATES THE CALENDAR OF FUTURE MILE- STONES UP TO FIRST LIGHT, AND LISTS THE SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMMES FOR THE OBSERVING TIME GUARANTEED TO THE OAC BY ESO FOR PROCUREMENT OF THE TELESCOPE. MASSIMO CAPACCIOLI1,21,2, DARIO MANCINI2, GIORGIOIORGIO SEDMAK3 1DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICAL SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES “FEDERICO II”, NAPLES, ITALY 2INAF – CAPODIMONTE ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY, NAPLES, ITALY 3DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY, UNIVERSITY OF TRIESTE, TRIESTE, ITALY HE VLTSURVEY TELESCOPE > 5 Mega-Euros observing facility, leading in (VST; Capaccioli et al. 2003a,b) science and capable of boosting the growth is a 2.61-m diameter imaging of the OAC community. A constraint to be telescope conceived for the duly considered was the una tantum nature of Paranal Observatory to support the grant, which strongly suggested that it TtheT VLT through its wide-field capabilities would not support a regular flow of resources and to perform stand-alone survey projects. for operations and maintenance. It features a f/5.5 modified Ritchey-Chretien As a result, in July 1997 the Capodimonte optical layout, a two-lens wide-field correc- Observatory was able to present to ESO a sci- tor, with the dewar window acting as a third entific and technical proposal envisaging the lens and an optional atmospheric dispersion design, construction, and installation at the compensator, an active primary mirror, a dou- Cerro Paranal Observatory, of a new technol- ble-hexapod driven secondary mirror, and an ogy telescope with a medium aperture, spe- alt-azimuth mounting. It will operate from the cialized in, and entirely devoted to wide-field UV- to the I-band, preserving, within a cor- (WF) imaging at optical and infrared wave- rected field of view of 1°× 1°, the excellent lengths. The goal was to ensure, by this in- seeing conditions achievable at the Cerro strument, its camera and the seeing qualities Paranal site. The telescope will be equipped of the Paranal site, a more than tenfold in- with just one focal plane instrument, Omega- crease in the scientific output with respect to CAM, a large-format (16 k × 16 k pixels) CCD the combination of the ESO/MPG 2.2-m re- camera built by an international consortium flector with WFI. Named VST for VLT Sur- of the same name. Fruit of a joint venture vey Telescope, the instrument was intended between ESO and the Capodimonte Astro- to complement the VLT with wide-angle nomical Observatory (OAC) of Naples, now imaging for the detection and pre-char- Figure 1a: The VST acterisation of sources to be further observed mounted up to the top research centre of the newly established ring, in the assembly Italian National Institute for Astrophysics with the larger telescopes, but it was also area at Scafati (Naples). (INAF), the VST (Figure 1a + 1b) is expect- meant for non-VLT related stand-alone sur- ed to become operational at Paranal in the vey programmes. spring of 2006. Figure 1b: The VST top ring with the M2 cell. A BIT OF HISTORY The opportunity to undertake a major scien- tific and technological venture was offered to OAC by the assignment of an unexpected- ly substantial grant in the framework of re- sources reserved by the Italian Government to promote southern regions. Such funds had been previously solicited to further develop the observing station implemented at Toppo di Castelgrande with a 1.5-m alt-azimuthal telescope (TT1). In 1996 the OAC director set a commission of experts with the task of updating the programme with ideas for a 10 The Messenger 120 The principles of the VST project were ac- Figure 2: Example of cepted by ESO a year later (Arnaboldi et al. the VST performances on stellar sources 1998). A Memorandum of Understanding (exposure time = (MoU) between ESO and OAC, subscribed 30 min, seeing = 1Ș, in June 1998, assigned to the Neapolitan ob- airmass = 1, and no moon). The calcu- servatory the procurement of the telescope, lator is available at and to ESO the realization of the enclosure the address: and the responsibility for operations and http://www.na.astro.it/~ maintenance of the instrument for a minimum rifatto/vst/vocet_2.htm. of 10 years. In return of its contribution, OAC was entitled to receive a share of the total VST observing time (GTO) of the order of 15–20% (to be re-evaluated at the end of con- struction on the ground of the actual costs of the various components of the project), and a number of hours at one VLT UT equivalent to 50 observing nights distributed over time, through the involvement in several national egy was defined in order to guarantee the opti- with a maximum of 6 in one semester. and international dedicated projects which mization of the whole system in terms of At its conception, the telescope was led to the following main results: mechanical design and optical interfacing by planned to support at most two instruments: – the completion of the OAC Deep Field the use of finite element analysis and com- a CCD camera for the optical domain (first (OACDF), a multi-band pilot survey over puter modelling. The mechanical design is priority), and a second camera for the non- 0.5 square deg conducted with the driven by the positioning accuracy and sta- thermal infrared domain. Technological and ESO/MPG 2.2-m WFI camera in cooper- bility required by the optical design of each budget limitations, together with the appear- ation with the observatories of Bologna, element for each optical configuration, con- ance of another WF telescope (VISTA), led Padua, and Rome (Alcalà et al. 2004); sidering the detector and its optical elements to specializing VST to the wavelength range – the creation of astrometric and photomet- as a part of the telescope, and so improving from UV to I. The design and manufactur- ric software tools in the context of a col- the integrated system design. The VST basic ing of the optical camera (OmegaCAM), laboration with TERAPIX at the Institut specifications are summarized in Table 1 and with a mosaic of 32 CCDs for a total of d’Astrophysique de Paris (Radovich et al. the expected operational image budget is 256 Mpixels mapping the field of view of 2004). A porting to C++ of these tools, reported in Table 2 (next page). The VST VST at a scale of 0.21 arcsec per 15 µm pixel, which were initially developed in PERL, enclosure at Paranal Observatory has been was contracted by a European consortium is now in progress; realized by ESO as a facility integrated into which includes the Netherlands, Germany, – the participation within the ASTRO- the VLT system (Figure 3, next page). Italy, and ESO. The MoU was signed in Jan- WISE consortium, an EU project funded The VST optics were procured through a uary 2000. through the FP5 RTD programme. In this contract with Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH, with The performance of the VST/OmegaCAM framework, a first version of a pipeline for the Russian firm LZOS JSC as subcontractor. system, computed with reference to the prop- the processing of wide-field images has The primary (M1) and secondary (M2) mir- erties of the optical components and of the been released. In the same context OAC is rors are made from Sitall, an optical glass CCD camera, is expected to exceed 50% ef- developing a tool for photometric varia- produced by LZOS JSC and similar to Zero- ficiency across the whole spectral range from bility, which will be mainly used for dur. The lenses for the WF correctors are of UV- to I-bands. A conservative estimate of SN searches, stellar variability studies, fused silica produced by Schott (Figure 4, the signal-to-noise ratio of the VST system and discovery of exoplanets. next page). The prismatic lenses for the on point sources observed in 5 bands with atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC) are 30 minutes exposure time gives a limiting DESIGN made from special glasses, also by Schott. In value of ~ 26 AB mag/arcsec2 (Figure 2). The design of the VST has been the respon- 2002 the primary mirror was destroyed in an The expected data rate for the scientific sibility of the Technology Working Group accident during shipment from Europe to projects of the Capodimonte GTO will be (TWG) of OAC in coordination with ESO for Chile. This enforced a series of emergency nearly 5 TB/year of non-compressed data. the validation of consistency to the VLTstan- actions to resolve the problem with minimum This flow raises the need of suitable HW/SW dards (Mancini et al. 2000). The project strat- impact on the final VST schedule. The new facilities. The hardware endowment at OAC consists of two Beowulf clusters: one is made of 17 dual Opteron CPU servers, to be used for data reduction; the second is a set of Table 1: VST telescope basic specifications 10 dual Pentium servers that will be dedicat- Telescope aperture 2 610 mm ed to data analysis. Concerning the manage- Image scale 0.214 arcsec/pixel ment of the VST data, software to archive fits Pixel reference size 15 µm files which uses http as transport protocol has Unvignetted 1.47° diagonal, been developed along with the fitshdr pack- field of view 1°× 1° square format age, a tool for fits header manipulation. The Detector 16 k × 16 k pixels CCD mosaic hardware for the massive data storage will be M1+M2 EE (80 %) < 0.3 arcsec (basic) acquired in time for the start of VST opera- M1+M2 EE (80 %) < 0.15 arcsec (intrinsic) tions.
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