VLT CUBES completes Final Design Review

The Cassegrain U-Band Efficient Spectrograph (CUBES), a future instrument for ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), has successfully passed its Final Design Review. 

ESO has now approved the construction of CUBES, a ground-based spectrograph capable of dedicated observations at ultraviolet or UV radiation at 300-400 nm, a region of the light spectrum never explored before with such high sensitivity with large telescopes. Observing in the ultraviolet from the ground is incredibly difficult due to the Earth’s atmosphere blocking most of the photons in this spectral range. This makes CUBES a revolutionary instrument.

The consortium is led by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF). Durham University (CfAI) leads the image slicer work package (Ariadna Calcines Rosario), providing the instrument two image slicers for High (R≥20,000) and Low (R~7,000) resolutions.

Read the full article here: Final design for new VLT instrument CUBES completed | ESO