ESO Annual Report 2004

La Silla Observatory
La Silla became the first observatory in the
world to receive the International Organization
of Standardization ISO9001:2000
certification. A team of international auditors
audited the Quality Management System
implemented at the observatory and
granted the certification thus ensuring the
highest possible quality level. Clearly, the
great strategic advantage of the ISO9001
approach is the continuous improvement
of all the core processes of the observatory.
The certification is just the beginning.
The preparations for merging La Silla and
Paranal into a single observatory – The
La Silla Paranal Observatory (LPO) – were
completed. As you read these pages,
ESO will be operating only one observatory
in Chile, the LPO, albeit with three sites!
The La Silla telescopes continued to operate
with high efficiency and high user satisfaction
this year. In terms of down
time, the long term goal of less than 2 %
loss of time due to technical problems
was comfortably achieved – in part owing
to the ISO9001 process. In fact, the
performance is almost at the 1% level – a
remarkable achievement if one considers
that 1% loss corresponds to a mere
3 hours in one month. User satisfaction,
as measured by the end of mission
reports, was above 70 % for all services,
reaching 80 to 90 % for technical support
and telescope operators. Only off-line
computing facilities was rated at 60 % satisfaction.
The OPTICON programme designed to
provide access to La Silla telescopes for
researchers of European non-ESO member
countries started this year. While
the number of nights allocated – through
the usual ESO OPC process – to OPTI-
CON access projects was quite small, the
programme is working and should in
time provide observing opportunities at
La Silla in particular to astronomers in
new EU member states, as their knowhow
reaches the levels required to pass
OPC scrutiny.
The average pressure factor (requested
time/available time) on the 3.6-m was 4.5,
2.1 for the NTT, and 1.3 for the ESO/MPG
2.2-m telescope. The observing schedule
was essentially Visitor Mode-based,
with about 10 % of the available nights
assigned to Service Mode on the NTT and
3.6-m telescopes. At the 2.2-m telescope,
the largest fraction of the scheduled time
with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) was assigned
to Service Mode.
The Wide Field Imager
at the 2.2-m ESO/MPG
telescope.
A number of improvements were introduced
to increase the efficiency of our
telescopes. The full upgrade of the 3.6-m
telescope was completed this year with
the replacement of the complete F/8 topend
of the telescope. Everything, from
the top ring and spiders to the collimation
and focusing mechanisms was changed
or implemented, leaving only the secondary
mirror and its cell. The improvements
were immediately noticeable: better image
quality (no coma), no image degradation
with telescope attitude, no hysteresis, and
reproducible focus. The specific impact
on operations of the HARPS high resolution
spectrograph was particularly impressive:
a full factor of 2 in efficiency! No
doubt scientific discoveries will soon follow.
HARPS has already proved to be a
unique tool for the detection of extra-solar
planets from minute radial velocity variations
of their parent stars, having detected
for the first time a rocky planet of about
14 Earth masses (see the Research Highlights
section).
ESO Annual Report 2004
The HARPS instrument.
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