EAGLE: an MOAO fed multi-IFU in the NIR on the E-ELT

Citations Over TimeTop 23% of 2008 papers

Abstract

EAGLE is an instrument under conceptual study for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). EAGLE will be installed at the Gravity Invariant Focal Station of the E-ELT, covering a field of view between 5 and 10 arcminutes. Its main scientific drivers are the physics and evolution of high-redshift galaxies, the detection and characterization of first-light objects and the physics of galaxy evolution from stellar archaeology. The top level requirements of the instrument call for 20 spectroscopic channels in the near infrared, assisted by Adaptive Optics. Several concepts of the Target Acquisition sub-system have been studied and are briefly presented. Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) over a segmented 5' field has been evaluated and compared to Multi-Object Adaptive Optics (MOAO). The latter has higher performance and is easier to implement, and is therefore chosen as the baseline for EAGLE. The paper provides a status report of the conceptual study, and indicates how the future steps will address the instrument development plan due to be completed within a year.

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