ARAL: a facility to fuel VLTI instruments with photons

Sebastien Morel; Martin Vannier; Serge Menardi; Fabio Biancat-Marchet; Michael D. Fischer; Philippe B. Gitton; Andreas Glindemann; Stephane Guisard; Nicholas Haddad; Nico Housen; Alexis Huxley; Mario Kiekebusch; Antonio Longinotti; Thanh Phan Duc; Markus Schoeller; Anders Wallander

doi:10.1117/12.550175

20 October 2004 ARAL: a facility to fuel VLTI instruments with photons

Sebastien Morel, Martin Vannier, Serge Menardi, Fabio Biancat-Marchet, Michael D. Fischer, Philippe B. Gitton, Andreas Glindemann, Stephane Guisard, Nicholas Haddad, Nico Housen, Alexis Huxley, Mario Kiekebusch, Antonio Longinotti, Thanh Phan Duc, Markus Schoeller, Anders Wallander

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 5491, New Frontiers in Stellar Interferometry; (2004) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.550175
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2004, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Abstract

The ARAL system of the VLTI is a multipurpose facility that helps to have the interferometric instruments ready for night observations. It consists of an artificial source (allowing a Mach-Zehnder mode of the interferometric instruments for autotest), an alignment unit (verifying the position of the celestial target in the VLTI field-of-view), and an optical path router (controlling the optical switchyard and the instrument feeding-optics in the VLTI laboratory). With the multiplication of VLTI instruments and their specific features (wavelength coverage, number of beams), an upgrade of ARAL (from its November 2002 version) had to be carried out: the alignment unit has been redesigned, as well as the artificial source. This source will provide a point in the visible and in J, H, K and N infrared bands, split into four beams (with a zero optical path difference at the reference position). After a description of the optomechanics and of the computer architecture of ARAL, we detail the difficulties of building an interferometric artificial source with a wide spectral range.

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Sebastien Morel, Martin Vannier, Serge Menardi, Fabio Biancat-Marchet, Michael D. Fischer, Philippe B. Gitton, Andreas Glindemann, Stephane Guisard, Nicholas Haddad, Nico Housen, Alexis Huxley, Mario Kiekebusch, Antonio Longinotti, Thanh Phan Duc, Markus Schoeller, and Anders Wallander "ARAL: a facility to fuel VLTI instruments with photons", Proc. SPIE 5491, New Frontiers in Stellar Interferometry, (20 October 2004); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.550175

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