ESO Annual Report 2004

IT Services
A reliable IT infrastructure is essential for
almost all aspects of ESO’s work. In order
to give assurance that the IT support
services and infrastructure are adequate
for our activities, technically up-to-date
and cost effective, ESO commissioned an
outside consultancy firm to conduct a
study of these aspects. The study, which
covered all ESO sites, was completed in
mid-2004 and confirmed that the level
of the ESO IT infrastructure is, in general,
technically good and also cost effective
in comparison with other similar organisations.
Clearly, there were areas where
improvements could be made and these
are now being addressed and implemented
by the ESO management.
A major change took place in May when
the data links between Garching and
the sites in Chile were switched over from
direct satellite links to an Internet connection.
The satellite link has been in service
for over 10 years, and has been used
for almost all type of communications
between sites, including telephone, fax,
ftp, email, ERP, and videoconference.
As well as being cheaper, the Internet connection
allows larger bandwidths and
has a much shorter transit time that is important
for some applications such as
the new ERP system.
Despite the many virus and hacker attacks
that occurred world-wide, ESO has escaped
rather lightly with only a few minor
incidents. This is largely due to the success
of the IT security upgrades that were
implemented in 2003.
In addition to its normal work, the Garching
IT Department has also assisted the
ALMA project by setting up the IT infrastructure
at the OSF site near San Pedro
de Atacama as well as at the Joint Alma
Office in Santiago.
Instrumentation
Highlights of the year included the successful
commissioning and science verification
of both the mid-infrared spectro-imager
VISIR and the adaptive optics
assisted, 3-dimensional, near-infrared
spectrometer SINFONI at the VLT. Both
instruments will be offered to the community
as of April 1, 2005. With then nine
regularly operating instruments (not including
interferometry) on its four 8-m Unit
Telescopes the VLT will offer an enormous
range of observing modes and hence
scientific capability, to be extended further
in the next few years with the arrival of the
last of the first generation instruments –
the very high resolution infrared spectrometer
CRIRES and the wide-field, nearinfrared,
imager HAWK-I. Some of the existing
instruments were also upgraded
during the year and, for the more distant
future, the already selected second-generation
VLT instruments X-Shooter, KMOS
and MUSE are in the design phase with a
large contribution from many institutes
throughout the ESO member states. The
two competing Phase A studies for the
Planet Finder instrument were also completed
in December. All of these projects
were presented and well received at
the large SPIE conference on Groundbased
Astronomical Instrumentation held
in Glasgow in June.
Preparing SINFONI
for the night.
VISIR passed its Preliminary Acceptance
Europe phase at Saclay near Paris in
Spring 2004 and arrived on Paranal towards
the end of March. After testing,
it was installed at the Cassegrain focus of
the VLT Melipal telescope and achieved
First Light on April 29. Commissioning was
adversely affected by some unusually bad
weather on Paranal but was largely completed
in three periods up to August since
when the instrument has been
used for a variety of science verification,
advanced guaranteed time, and operational
dry run observations in preparation
for its use by the general community in
2005.
The SINFONI Adaptive Optics Module was
completed at ESO Garching and then
installed at the Cassegrain focus of the
Yepun telescope in May where its commissioning
went extremely smoothly
for such a complex system. The SINFONI
SPIFFI spectrometer was completed in
May at the MPE Garching, including its
upgrade with a new camera and 2 k x 2 k
infrared array plus associated electronics
and software, which was implemented
with support from ESO and NOVA.
This resulted in a substantial improvement
compared with the 1 k x 1 k array used
ESO Annual Report 2004
47