CARMENES will be optimized for searches of planets around stars with very low masses. With m/s class stability in the near-infrared and simultaneous monitoring of activity indicators in the visible, superearths (large exoearths) can be detected in the habitable zones of ~300 M dwarfs. The instrument is well-suited for operation of Calar Alto in a "large experiment mode". Smaller dedicated campaigns can also be performed to use asteroseismology to refine the parameters of planet host stars.
Its members are: PI: Pedro Amado González, PM: Miguel Andrés Sánchez Carrasco, Engineers: Ovidio Rabaza Castillo, Conchi Cárdenas Vázquez, Alejandro Ramón Ballesta, Santiago Becerril Jarque, Eduard Mirabet Puig, Luis Costillo Iciarra, Miguel Abril Martí, Alicia Rodríguez Trinidad and Rafael Morales Muñoz
The research group SIDE is dedicated to the instrumental development for survey spectrographs, and, in particular, to Fiber Positioners.
Currently, a Positioner prototype is being tested in the lab, from the mechanical and electronics point of view. The control software is also under development. The company AVS (Eibar) and the University of Barcelona are collaborators of SIDE. SIDE participated in the Phase A study of the ESO ELT instrument OPTIMOS-EVE. Futures plans include a participation in the BigBOSS instrument (LBNL, Berkeley) to which SIDE has been formally invited.
Its members are: PI: F. Prada, PM: M. Azzaro, Engineers: S. Becerril, J. Sanchez, I. Morales.
UDIT (Unidad de Desarrollo Instrumental y Tecnológico) del IAA-CSIC is involved in the development of the instrument Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) onboard Solar Orbiter, one satellite of Cosmic Vision program of ESA. PHI will provide maps of the magnetic vector and of the line-of-sight (LOS) velocity in the solar photosphere. It will thus probe the deepest layers of the Sun (including the solar interior using helioseismology) of all the instruments on Solar Orbiter or the Inner Heliospheric Sentinels The instrument consists of two telescopes: The High Resolution Telescope (HRT) will provide a restricted FOV of 16.8 arcmin squared and achieve a spatial resolution that, near the closest perihelion pass, will be about 150 km on the Sun. The Full Disk Telescope (FDT), with a FOV of 2.6° squared and a pixel size of 730 km (at 0.22 AU), will provide a complete view of the full solar disk during all orbital phases. The two telescopes are used sequentially and their selection is made by a feed selection mechanism.
The IAA is the responsible for the E-Box (Electronic subsystem) and harness of the whole instrument. Inside of the E-Box, the analog and mechanisms board will be also designed at IAA.
Its members are: PI: José Carlos del Toro Iniesta, PM: Antonio López Jiménez, Engineers: Beatriz Aparicio del Moral, Fernando Gírela Rejón, Miguel Herranz de la Revilla, José María Jerónimo Zafra, José Luis Ramos Más, Daniel Álvarez García, María Balaguer Jiménez, Juan Pedro Cobos Carrascosa.
The BepiColombo mission will be among the first missions to seriously explore Mercury, one of the last unknown realms of the Solar System. It must, therefore, provide fundamental knowledge about the planet and lay the ground for any further exploration e.g., by future lander missions. The importance of Mercury stems from its position as the innermost planet and from its unusual composition. It is widely held that understanding Mercury will provide a quantum leap in understanding the formation and evolution of the Solar System. A fundamental task of exploratory space missions is to characterize and measure the figure, topography, and surface morphology of the target planet. A state of the art tool for this task is a laser altimeter because it can provide absolute topographic height and position with respect to a Mercury centred co-ordinate system. The instrument proposed is designed to fulfill the role of the laser altimeter system. The technology of space laser altimetry is new in Europe. The BepiColombo Laser Altimeter (BELA) will be the first of such instruments developed for a European space mission, in which Spain, and more concisely the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA), will build the power supply into the BELA subsystems. BELA will measure the
The laser altimeter will form an integral part of a larger geodesy and geophysics package, incorporating radio science and stereo imaging. The instrument is being built by an international consortium in which Switzerland and Germany are the two PI nations, Spain provides part of the hardware. The design and development of the power supply is responsibility of the IAA, which is nowadays already in progress.
IAA-CSIC Team is: PI: Luisa M. Lara López, PM: José María Castro Marín, Ingenieros: Miguel Herranz de la Revilla, Julio Rodrigo Campos
The participation in this project is focused on the scientific and technical collaboration in the Declaration of Interest (DOI) of a scientific instrument for the joint NASA-ESA mission to the Europa-Jupiter system. The European part of the mission is named Laplace. The mission was selected by ESA, within is Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme as one of the L-class missions to go into Industrial Assessment Phase and definition of Technology Development Plan. A call for instrument was issued by ESA in April 2010. Italy, Germany, France and Spain responded to this call proposing a Wide Angle and Stereo Camera to study the Ganymede’s surface and Jupiter’s atmosphere. This instrument has been recommended by ESA for further studies. The IAA-CSIC is responsible for the filter positioning mechanism. In this A0 phase, the feasibility study has aimed to develop the electro-mechanical design of the filter wheel of the instrument Wide Angle Camera of the Jupiter-Ganymede Orbiter on board the Europa-Jupiter System Mission.
The IAA-CSIC responsibility will be the Filter Wheel Mechanism (FWM). FWM main purpose will be the positioning of the optical filters in front of the detector with high accuracy. The assembly is composed of a:
IAA-CSIC Team members are: PI: Luisa M. Lara López, PM: José María Castro Marín, Engineers: Miguel Herranz de la Revilla, Julio Rodrigo Campos
PANIC (PAnoramic Near Infrared camera for Calar Alto) is presently being built for the 2.2m and 3.5m telescopes at Calar Alto observatory (CAHA) in Spain. This is the first instrument built under the German-Spanish consortium that manages the Calar Alto observatory.
This camera will offer a 31.9x31.9 arcmin of field of view (FOV) at the 2.2m telescope and 16.9x16.9 arcmin at the 3.5m telescope. It uses a mosaic of four HAWAII-2RG detectors of 2k x 2k made by Teledyne and covers the spectral range from 0.8-2.5 µm (Z to KS band) with both broad and narrow band filters.
The camera optical design is a folded single optical train that images the sky onto the focal plane with a plate scale of 0.45 arcsec per 18 µm pixel at the 2.2m telescope and 0.23 arcsec per pixel at the 3.5m telescope. The mentioned FOV is the largest unvignetted field that can be obtained at the Cassegrain focus at the 2.2m telescope.
The most important challenges are the large field, the wavelength coverage, the cryogenic pupil stop and the fact that the whole instrument has to work at cryogenic temperatures (80K achieved by liquid nitrogen cooling).
The instrument's cold optomechanics consists of nine lenses up to a diameter of 255 mm and three rectangular folding mirrors. A compact filter unit can carry up to 19 filters distributed over four filter wheels.
Since there is a weight limit of only 400 kg at the 2.2m telescope, the cryostat design and the opto-mechanics have been lightweighted and all parts are made of aluminium wherever possible. The instrument has a diameter of 1.1 m and it is about 1 m long. The aluminium vacuum vessel and radiation shield have wall thicknesses of only 6 mm and 3 mm respectively.
Currently the design is finished, the first parts are being manufactured and the optical elements are ordered.
Its members are: PI: Matilde Fernández Hernández; PM: Julio Rodríguez Gómez; Engineers: Antonio García Segura, José Miguel Ibáñez Mengual, Conchi Cárdenas Vázquez.
The NOMAD Instrument are three spectrographs, two in infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum and the third in the ultraviolet to study the atmosphere of Mars from orbital TGO (Trace Gas Orbiter). This instrument is the heir of the previous instruments SOIR (Venux Express space mission) and UVIS (ExoMars space mission payload HPL was discarded in may 2009)
NOMAD works in different modes: solar occultation, limb and nadir, with the aim of detecting traces of gasses in the composition of the atmospheres, characterization of dust, aerosols and clouds. The different channels will be SO (IR spectrograph for solar occultation mode), LNO (IR spectrograph for the acquisition of nadir and limb modes) and UVIS (ultraviolet spectrograph for all modes).
IAA is responsible for all electronics and software of the instrument.
Its members are: PI: José Juan López Moreno; PM: Julio Rodríguez Gómez; Engineers: Beatriz Aparicio del Moral, José María Jerónimo Zafra, Rafael Morales Muñoz, María del Rosario Sanz Mesa.
The Sprite Etalon Spectrograph (SES) instrument is a narrow band, medium spectral resolution (R = 5050) spectrograph working in the visible spectral range that has been partly developed at the UDIT of the IAA and which main scientific goal is to contribute to our present general understanding of the nature of Transient Luminous Events (TLE) ocurring in the Earth’s mesosphere. In particular, SES is expected to shed some light on the possible impact of TLEs on the chemical and electrical properties of the Earth’s atmosphere. The SES instrument will be placed in Calar Alto observatory (CAHA) in Almería, Spain, and it is designed to carry out high spectral resolution spectroscopy of visible optical emissions from TLEs (in particular of sprites and halos) as well as to characterize the possible polarization of the light emitted by TLEs. A remotely controlled mount carries the SES spectrograph and polarimeter. The system works under different operation modes. In general, after consulting real time positive cloud to ground lightning location, the system can automaticaly point to the geographical locations (up to 500 km away) with the highest concentration of heavy electric thunderstorms producing positive cloud to ground lightning that are the ones mostly associated to TLEs such sprites and halos taking place at mesospheric altitudes almost right above their parent positive lightning.
The members of the SES team are: PI: Francisco J. Gordillo-Vázquez; PM: Justo Sánchez del Río, Engineers: María Passas Varo, Conchi Cárdenas Vázquez. Scientific Team: Francisco J.Gordillo-Vázquez, Alejandro Luque, Francisco C. Parra Rojas.
“Bayesian Modeling and Inference in Computational Photography. Design of a prototype of digital camera for multiple exposure and programmable coded aperture.”
Image processing with algorithms to obtain clear pictures and increase the depth of field. For this, it will develop two types of masks: coded aperture and programmable aperture.
IAA is responsible for the development of a prototype camera with different masks: Electronics, Optics and Mechanics.
Its members are: PI: Rafael Molina (UGR); PM: Julio Rodríguez Gómez; Engineers: Isabel Bustamante Díaz, Gian Paolo Candini, Conchi Cárdenas Vázquez, Luis Costillo Iciarra, José María Jerónimo Zafra, María del Rosario Sanz Mesa.
The main goal of this EU FP7 funded project (270192) is to package the full scientific methodology in a digital container that keeps the lifecycle of an experiment, linking data and services for their analysis, going for publication beyond the pdf. This container is called Research Object (RO). The actions of the project are:
The partner of this project are Intelligent Software Components iSOCO (Coordinator), University of Manchester, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, University of Oxford, Leiden University Medical Center and IAA-CSIC.
The IAA-CSIC team members are: Lourdes Verdes-Montenegro, José E. Ruíz del Mazo and Susana Sánchez Expósito.
