 Astronomical Instrumentation and Surveys
CAUP participates in the scientific and technical development of Astronomical Instrumentation and dedicated observation Surveys, which transverses both major scientific areas in CAUP. The development of new instrumentations is important to secure privileged access to existing and future facilities of the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO) and of the European Space Agency (ESA). The participation of CAUP in large observation Surveys is also important to give direct acess to the available data in first hand. Both the involvement in instruments or in large Surveys contribute to the long term development of Astronomy in Portugal. CAUP as an institution and several CAUP members have been involved in the scientific definition of astronomical instrumentation and several projects that are already running in collaboration with other Portuguese teams. Here it is listed the several projects divided into the sections of Space based projects and Ground Based projects. Space projects Task Leader: António C. da Silva  Contact at CAUP: Mário J. P. F. G. Monteiro  This is a Discovery Program for detecting potentially life-supporting planets around other stars. Kepler is poised to find planets 30 to 600 times less Massive than Jupiter. Following the agreement between Denmark (Aarhus) and NASA, a Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC) has been created to take over the Asteroseismology component of this mission. CAUP participates in the KASC Steering Committee and the team is involved in the development of the seismic pipeline and exploitation of the seismic data. See also: KASC Scientific Webpage Kepler mission website Contact at CAUP: Mário J. P. F. G. Monteiro  This is a space project for the study of stellar interiors using asteroseismology and detection of planets around stars. CAUP participated in the Preparation of this mission since 2002 (following a successful application to an AO by ESA). The participation is at the Co-I level with access to all data in the asteroseismology core programme (and some additional programmes). CAUP coordinates an international team on the development, optimization and documentation of evolution and seismic tools for asteroseismology: CoRoT/ESTA. See also: CoRoT@Portugal CoRoT mission website  Contact at CAUP: António C. da Silva This mission was designed to image the anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation Field over the whole sky, with unprecedented sensitivity and angular resolution. Planck Surveyor is a major source of information relevant to several cosmological and astrophysical issues, such as testing theories of the early universe and the origin of cosmic structure. CAUP participates in this mission by being involved in the activities of the Planck Working Group 5: Clusters and Secondary Anisotropies.
Ground Telescopes and Instrumentation Task Leader: Pedro Figueira Contact at CAUP: Nuno C. Santos  This spectrograph is under preparation by a consortium of 4 countries, in close collaboration with ESO. It is currently approved for instalation in the VLT. The Portuguese participation, coordinated by CAUP, also includes CAAUL. The key science goals of the consortium is to use this new-generation spectrograph to search for rocky extra-solar planets in the habitable zone and to determine the possible variability of physical constants. See also: Espresso mission website VLT website Contact at CAUP: Sérgio A. G. Sousa  Gaia-ESO is a large public spectroscopic survey, targeting more that 100000 stars, systematically covering all major components of our galaxy, from halo to star forming regions, providing the first homogeneous overview of the distributions of kinematics and elemental abundances. This will substancially increase the knowledge of Galactic and stellar evolution. With the Gaia astrometry the survey will quantify the formation history and evolution of young, mature and ancient Galactic populations. With well-defined samples, we will survey the bulge, thick and thin discs and halo components, and open star clusters of all ages and masses. See also: GAIA-ESO Survey Data Archive Contact at CAUP: M. S. Nanda Kumar  VISTA is a 4-m class wide field survey telescope for the southern hemisphere, equipped with a near infrared camera (1.65 degree diameter field of view at VISTA's nominal pixel size) containing 67 million pixels of mean size 0.34 arcsec and available broad band filters at Z,Y,J,H,Ks and a narrow band filter at 1.18 micron. The point spread function (PSF) of the telescope+camera system (including pixels) is designed to have a full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 0.51 arcsec. Seeing, and other weather realted statistics for Cerro Paranal are given at ESO's Astroclimatology of Paranal pages and the VISTA site is expected to have similar conditions. 75% of the VISTA time available to ESO will be available for large scale public surveys and the remaining 25% for smaller proprietary surveys. VISTA data released for public use can be retreived either by the ESO data archive or here. See also: VISTA website Advanced information on technical, observing and data issues VISTA Science Archive Contact at CAUP: Carlos M. Correia  The Raven project, being developed at the University of Victoria Adaptive Optics Lab, will be the first Multi-Object Adaptive Optics (MOAO) technical and science demonstrator installed on an 8 m class telescope, the Subaru Telescope. In partnership with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics and Tohoku University, the Raven team will deliver a carry-in instrument to the near-infrared (NIR) Nasmyth platform of Subaru. CAUP's participation include the tomographic wave-front reconstruction and efficient real-time numerical solvers. See also: Raven project website Contact at CAUP: Carlos M. Correia  The SCExAO acronym stands for Subaru Telescope Extreme Adaptive Optics project. It is an active, ongoing effort to equip the Subaru Telescope with a high performance coronagraph and a series of wavefront control solutions that make an optimal use of the angular resolution that an 8-meter telescope has to offer. The ultimate science goal of SCExAO is the direct imaging of extrasolar planets around stars at the limit of diffraction in the near infrared, more specifically in the H-band, at 1.6 microns. Two other large scale projects with comparable science goal are currently being assembled: The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) that will equip the Gemini South Telescope in 2012, and the Spectro Polarimetric High contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) for the VLT. Instead of competing with these two heavyweight projects, SCExAO is trying to offer complementary capability, by focusing on very small angular separation: 40 - 500 milli-arcseconds. CAUP's contribution include non-linear optimisation for curvature wave-front sensing and phase diversity for system calibration. See also: SCExAO project website SPHERE website Gemini Planet Imager website Contact at CAUP: Pedro Figueira  The HARPS-N instrument is a twin of the very successful ESO's HARPS spectrograph. It is mounted at the TNG telescope at Observatorio Roque de Los Muchachos, La Palma, and its aims are two-fold: 1) use its exquisite precision to detect low-mass rocky planets and 2) take advantage of the access to northern hemisphere sky to confirm Kepler planetary candidates. I am participating in the development of the radial-velocity reduction pipeline, and contributing with my experience to the observations in this initial and very important stage of the spectrograph's life. See also: HARPS-North website
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