Daily Image
05-06-2014
MATISSE LM Cold Optics Bench at MPIA
| Submitter: | Felix Bettonvil |
| Description: | After delivery of the first Cold Optics Bench (COB) of MATISSE in October last year, this spring also the second COB has been shipped to consortium partner MPIA (Max Planck Institute fuer Astronomie), where it currently undergoes the first tests. Both COBs are the Dutch contributions to MATISSE and have been designed and built by the NOVA Optical and Infrared Instrumentation Division at ASTRON. The delivery was celebrated at the Hannover Messe, held in April in Germany, and attended by both the Dutch secretary of state OC&W Sander Dekker, OCW Directeur Onderzoek en Wetenschap beleid Nora van der Wenden, NOVA director Wilfried Boland and NOVA chairman Paul Groot. A dozen industrial companies that contributed to MATISSE as well as a hundred visitors attended the ceremony. As part of the hand-over event, Felix Bettonvil (NOVA) and Frans Snik (U Leiden) highlighted two NOVA instrumental achievements, the first being the MATISSE work, the second iSPEX, a citizen science project aiming at measurements of aerosols with smartphones. On the upper picture, Dutch MATISSE project manager Felix Bettonvil on behalf of NOVA and Dr. Klaus Jaeger on behalf of MPIA sign the delivery document, with in the background also MATISSE lead engineer Gabby Kroes. The lower image shows the LM COB at MPIA on top of the cryostat base, shortly before closing the cryostat. MATISSE is an instrument designed for coherently combining the light of up to four telescopes of ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). By doing so, the VLTI and MATISSE emulate the aperture of a telescope with diameter of up to 200 m, resulting in a spatial resolution of up to 5 milli-arcsec in the L, M and N bands. Combined with a spectral resolution between 30 and 5000, it makes that MATISSE is well suited for the study of Young Stellar Objects, extra-solar planets and Active galactic nuclei, asymptotic giant branch stars and planetary nebulae. |
| Copyright: | NOVA Optical Infrared Instrumentation group |
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