UKRI-2132 METIS LMS Large Mirrors

Description

The UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC) is a laboratory within the Science & Technology Facilities Council which is part of UK Research & Innovation. The UK ATC has responsibility within the METIS project to design, build, test and deliver the LMS to our project partners NOVA in The Netherlands. Lot 1: The European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in Chile, will be the world’s largest telescope operating in the visible and infrared wavelength domain. It is part of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), an inter-governmental research organization. METIS is an imager and spectrometer for the (ELT), operating at wavelengths of 2.7 micron to around 14 micron. A subsystem within METIS is the LM band spectrometer (LMS) which will provide high resolution (R ≈ 100,000) over the range 2.7-5.3 micron. A pre-disperser (a low resolution prism spectrometer) with an exit slit mask is used to define the bandpass within the LM band, acting as an order sorting filter for the echelle. Multiple exposures with rotation of the pre-disperser and main disperser are required to build up a continuous spectrum.