The EAGLE instrument for the E-ELT: developments since delivery of Phase A

摘要

The EAGLE instrument is a Multi-Object Adaptive Optics (MOAO) fed, multiple Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS),working in the Near Infra-Red (NIR), on the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). A Phase A design studywas delivered to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) leading to a successful review in October 2009. Since thattime there have been a number of developments, which we summarize here. Some of these developments are alsodescribed in more detail in other submissions at this meeting.The science case for the instrument, while broad, highlighted in particular: understanding the stellar populations ofgalaxies in the nearby universe, the observation of the evolution of galaxies during the period of rapid stellar build-upbetween redshifts of 2-5, and the search for 'first light' in the universe at redshifts beyond 7. In the last 2 years substantialprogress has been made in these areas, and we have updated our science case to show that EAGLE is still an essentialfacility for the E-ELT. This in turn allowed us to revisit the science requirements for the instrument, confirming most ofthe original decisions, but with one modification.The original location considered for the instrument (a gravity invariant focal station) is no longer in the E-ELTConstruction Proposal, and so we have performed some preliminary analyses to show that the instrument can be simplyadapted to work at the E-ELT Nasmyth platform.Since the delivery of the Phase A documentation, MOAO has been demonstrated on-sky by the CANARY experiment atthe William Herschel Telescope.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.