PRIMA was a VLTI facility compromising many subsystems, which underwent commisioning in 2008-09. It has since been decommissioned and replaced by GRAVITY. More details on the project can be found at the PRIMA Web site.

This commissioning data release includes a total of 2034 files (~34.7 GB) collected over 38 nights split in six periods plus one UT technical night. All data was collected in single-feed fringe tracking using the VLTI instrument PACMAN operating the PRIMA fringe sensor units (FSU). One of the purposes of these observations was to test, debug and characterize the behavior of the fringe sensor units (FSUs). At the same time, the instrument was operated with the objective of testing hardware, software and its interactions with the rest of the VLTI infrastructure.

From COMM1 to COMM6, observations were done using the auxiliary telescopes in different baselines and instrument configurations. During the UTs technical night, UT3-UT4 baseline was used. A proportion of the files are calibrations, namely, laboratory darks and flats fields, sky background and sky flats fields. The rest are fringe tracking observations. The targets include many bright (Kmag 5) and totally resolved sources. There is some small proportion of observations done on fainter stars or partially resolved stars. The fits header contains the target name for reference.

This data is currently being used by the instrument team to establish the working range of the fringe sensor of PRIMA.

Information on the status of the instrument during the observations can be obtained from the commissioning team, which can be contacted via R. Abuter.

By clicking on the following links, one can download the Commissioning files from the ESO archive:

• COMM1 Oct 16-26, 2008; 462 files, (6.8 Gb): all files or file-by-file
• COMM2 Nov 19-29, 2008; 375 files, (8.0 Gb): all files or file-by-file
• COMM3 Jan 28-Feb 8, 2009; 375 files, (6.8 Gb): all files or file-by-file
• COMM-UT March 8, 2009; 57 files, (1.7 Gb): all files or file-by-file
• COMM4 March 24-April 1, 2009; 104 files, (1.6 Gb): all files or file-by-file
• COMM5 Jun 14-24, 2009; 234 files, (4.2 Gb): all files or file-by-file
• COMM6 Jul 19-29, 2009; 508 files,(5.6 Gb): all files or file-by-file

If the data are used in a scientific publication, credit should be given to ESO and to the Garching and Paranal Instrument Team who executed all of the observations.