Instrumentation Projects
The PSF department is involved in a number of astronomical instrumentation projects, ranging from space instruments like MIRI and long baseline interferometers like GRAVITY to Adaptive Optics instruments like SPHERE.
For a list of all current and past MPIA instrumentation projects, see the overview of ground-based and of space-based projects.
Current instrumentation projects
The Planetary Camera and Spectrograph will be the ELT's equivalent to the SPHERE instrument. Equipped with its own eXtreme Adaptive Optics (XAO) system, sophisticated coronagraphs, differential imaging systems and high-resolution spectroscopic facilities it is foreseen to enable the detection and characterization of exoplanets down to Earth-size in the solar neighbourhood. Achieving contrast levels of 10⁻⁹ at separations of a tenth of an arc second, PCS will be able to look for biosignatures in the atmospheres of nearby (<10pc) exoplanets.
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METIS is one of the three first instruments for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), Europe’s next-generation ground-based telescope for optical and infrared wavelengths which is currently under construction at the ESO site at Cerro Armazones in Chile.
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GRAVITY is a 2nd generation near-infrared VLTI instrument that combines the light of the four unit or four auxiliary telescopes of the ESO Paranal observatory in Chile.
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The main objective of SPHERE is to detect and characterize, by means of direct imaging, giant exoplanets in orbit around nearby stars.
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A mid-infrared imaging spectro-interferometer for the ESO/VLT.
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Mid-infrared Instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope (NASA, ESA and CSA)
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