ESPRESSO

ESPRESSO, the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, will combine the efficiency of modern echelle spectrograph design with extreme radial-velocity measure precision. It will be installed on ESO's VLT in order to achieve a gain of two magnitudes with respect to its predecessor HARPS and the instrumental radial velocity measure precision will be improved to reach the cm/s level. Thanks to its characteristics and the ability of combining incoherently the light of 4 large telescopes, ESPRESSO will offer new possibilities in various fields of astronomy. The main scientific objectives will be the search and characterization of rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone of quiet, nearby G to M-dwarfs and the analysis of the variability of fundamental physical constants. In this project the Observatory of Trieste is responsible for the design, implementation and deployment at Cerro Paranal Observatory of the electronics and of the control and data analysis software.

Milestones: Acceptance in Europe: 2017, Open to Community: 2018.

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Ph.D.: 

Link: http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/develop/instruments/espresso.html

Electronics (contact: I.Coretti)
Operating ESPRESSO requires a large number of functions: motorized stages, lamps, digital and analog sensors that, coupled with dedicated Technical CCDs (two per arm), allow to stabilize the incoming beam up to the level needed to achieve the scientific requirements.

The Instrument Control Electronics goal is to properly control all the functions in the Combined Coudé Laboratory and the spectrograph itself. It is fully based on a distributed PLC architecture, abandoning in this way the VME-based technology previously adopted for the ESO VLT instruments.

 

Control SW (contact: P. Di Marcantonio)
The ESPRESSO control software architecture is compliant with the ESO/VLT standards and is based on the VLT Control Software package. The Observation Software (OS) coordinates an exposure. It receives the command sequences to be executed by the Broker for Observation Blocks and forwards them to the involved control software subsystems: the Telescope Control Software, the Detector Control Software and the Instrument Control Software. At the end of the exposure, OS merges the information coming from the different subsystems and archives them. The ESPRESSO control software will run on a dedicated Instrument Workstation located in the VLT computer room.

 

Data Analysis (contact: V. D'Odorico)
ESPRESSO will be the first ESO VLT instrument to have a dedicated data analysis software package in addition to the data reduction one. This choice was dictated by the exceptional characteristics of the instrument and the very specific science cases for which it will be built. The software will be made up of two different branches, for the analysis of quasar spectra and star spectra, respectively. The Trieste group is in charge for developing the quasar branch, which will contain tools for the automatic determination of the continuum level, the Voigt-profile fitting of spectral lines, and the identification of absorption systems. The software will take advantage of the new ESO Reflex graphical interface, which allows for a seamless, intuitive handling of science data. An example of the foreseen Reflex workflow for the quasar branch is shown in the figure below.

The first public release of the ESPRESSO-DAS is expected in the 2015; the first working version of the Reflex workflow has been internally released in 2014 to help the ongoing verification of the code.