| The Thuringian State Observatory Tautenburg is part of a consortium building the high-resolution spectrograph PLATOSpec. This instrument will be mounted on a 1.52-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in La Silla, Chile, during the course of 2024. An important milestone has now been reached for the project: a new front-end has been installed on the telescope, and the calibration unit has been installed. |  |
The workshops of the Thuringian State Observatory have developed, built, and tested the calibration unit for the spectrograph PLATOSpec. At the end of March 2024, it was mounted on the 1.52-meter telescope of the ESO in La Silla, Chile, together with a new front-end.
The calibration unit serves as a reference for the telescope's observations. For this purpose, the spectrum of a thorium-argon lamp is used, whose spectral lines are already known. The spectrograph PLATOSpec will desperse the starlight captured by the telescope into a spectrum. This spectrum is then compared with that of the thorium-argon lamp. This provides researchers with a wavelength reference point. Additionally, an iodine cell is used for calibration. With the spectrum produced by this iodine cell, the radial velocity (Doppler shift) of a star can be measured very accurately.
The front-end connects the spectrograph to the telescope. It was built by the Czech company TopTech, Turnov. The Thuringian State Observatory, as a partner of the PLATOSpec consortium, commissioned, supervised, and financed the construction of the front-end.
The calibration unit and the front-end are prerequisites for connecting the PLATOSpec instrument to the 1.52-meter telescope. The spectrograph PLATOSpec is still under construction. PLATOSpec will be a state-of-the-art echelle spectrograph with high spectral resolution, covering the spectral range from 350 to 700 nanometers. PLATOSpec will support satellite missions TESS and PLATO with ground-based follow-up observations. The aim of these missions is to find planets around stars other than the Sun, known as extrasolar planets.
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The PLATOSpec instrument is being built by a consortium of three institutes. The main partners of the consortium are the Astronomical Institute ASCR in Ondrejov, Czech Republic, the Thuringian State Observatory, Tautenburg, Germany, and the Pontificia Universidad Católica (PUC) de Chile, Santiago, Chile. The contribution of the Thuringian State Observatory to PLATOSpec was financed by the Thüringer Aufbaubank with funds from the research promotion program of the state of Thuringia.