Multi-million-euro grant for the completion of MICADO

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The University Observatory’s instrumentation group headed by Professor Ralf Bender has received a 3.15 million Euro grant from the ErUM program of the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR). The funds will be used for the completion of the first-light camera MICADO for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. With its 39m primary mirror, the ELT will be the world’s largest optical-near-infrared telescope by far and surpass the currently largest telescopes (with 8m to10m mirror diameter) by about a factor 20 in light collecting power. The ELT will be equipped with an adaptive optics system to compensate atmospheric turbulence which will allow MICADO to provide images and spectroscopy with a spatial resolution of approximately 0.005 arc-seconds on the sky. This is about a factor 10 better resolution than the Hubble Space Telescope or the James-Webb Space Telescope can provide. With this unprecedented resolution, the ELT with MICADO will revolutionise the study of highest redshift galaxies and the search for supermassive black holes; it will also have major impact on many other fields of astrophysics, including stars and extrasolar planets.

MICADO is built by a consortium of European institutes headed by the MPI for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching. Professor Bender’s instrumentation group is the second largest partner in the construction of MICACO. The group develops critical opto-mechanical components, electronics and parts of the control software. MICADO will be transported to Chile in 2029, for first light in 2030. The MICADO project started with preliminary design studies in 2011, the total BMFTR funding granted to the observatory’s instrumentation group since then amounts to over 11 million Euros. For its contribution to the construction of MICADO, Professor Bender’s group will receive guaranteed observing time at the ELT.