Within ESO our department acts mainly in the field of instrument integration. Our expertise in opto-mechanics, cryogenics, CAD brought us to internal developments.

These developments are in general instrument subsystems or testing tools which are not available on the market simply because it's too specific and expensive for being developed by external companies. Here we presents some examples which have been built in the past in the framework of various projects.

• Fibre bundle
  This device was build as a subsystem of MACAO-VLTI, the adaptive optics for the Very Large Telescope Interferometer.
• Continuous flow Cryostat
  This device has been developed to provide a continuous flow of nitrogen in our cryostat. This automatic system avoid human interventions to maintain the cryostat temperature to pre-define set up point.
• Infrared Test Camera (ITC)
  This is a famous and very useful internal development of a 1K IR camera used mainly for adaptive optics projects.
• Adaptive Optics test bench
  The test bench which has been used so far to test the 4 MACAO-VLTI system and which is being converted now for HOT, the High Order Test bench for adaptive optics.
• OmegaCam cooling system
  Obviously a cooling system developed for OmegaCam, a camera for the VLT survey telescope (VST).
• Active Segmented mirror
  This device (ASM) was developed to be a scaled down segmented mirror for the active phasing experiment. It has been used for APE demonstrator.