CTA is a large science infrastructure with many individual units and a high degree of complexity. There are many good reasons to design and implement the simplest and most harmonized system possible. One prominent area concerns the Small-Sized Telescope (SST) where harmonization is of very high importance due to the large number of units to be built, operated and maintained.
On Monday 29 April, the Compact High Energy Camera (CHEC) prototype camera, CHEC-S, was installed on the ASTRI-Horn telescope, a prototype Small-Sized Telescope (SST) for CTA. The following day, the camera was turned on and achieved first light, recording thousands of Cherenkov events in the first evening of observations.
The observations of the Crab Nebula were carried out between December 2018 and January 2019, during the ASTRI-Horn telescope verification phase, for a total observation time of about 29 hours, divided in on- and off-axis source exposure.
Building the world’s largest observatory is no small task. It requires meticulous consideration of every aspect of building and maintaining the technology – from funding and foundations to software and safety – and the experience and resources to determine those requirements and plot the path forward. In the past six months, we have been making major strides toward putting all the pieces in place. Here is a summary of some of the main achievements and developments within the Project Office.
On Thursday, 31 August, 2017, a prototype telescope proposed for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), the SST-1M, recorded its first events while undergoing testing at the Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ-PAN) in Krakow, Poland. The SST-1M is proposed as one of CTA’s Small-Sized Telescopes (SSTs), which will cover the high end of CTA’s energy range, between about 1 and 300 TeV (tera-electronvolts).
During the nights of 25 and 26 May, the camera of the ASTRI telescope prototype recorded its first ever Cherenkov light while undergoing testing at the astronomical site of Serra La Nave (Mount Etna) in Sicily managed by INAF-Catania. This accomplishment was the first optical demonstration for astronomical telescopes using the novel Schwarzschild Couder dual-mirror design.
In March 2017, the GCT camera prototype was taken from its laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, back to Meudon for a two-week commissioning campaign. A team of 12 worked around the clock to install the camera and run observing shifts with the goal to finalise the safety and operation procedure tests for the telescope and camera. This was the first time the camera would include a dedicated safety system and the first time the telescope would track cosmic sources.
In October 2016, the ASTRI telescope prototype, a novel dual-mirror Schwarzschild-Couder telescope design proposed for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), passed its biggest test yet by demonstrating a constant point-spread function of a few arc minutes over a large field of view of 10 degrees.
On 13 June 2016, the governing body of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory gGmbH (CTAO gGmbH), the CTA Council, selected Bologna as the host site of the CTA Headquarters and Berlin – Zeuthen for the Science Data Management Centre (SDMC) from five site candidates.
On 13 June 2016, the governing body of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory gGmbH (CTAO gGmbH), the CTA Council, selected Bologna as the host site of the CTA Headquarters and Berlin – Zeuthen for the Science Data Management Centre (SDMC) from five site candidates.