ANDES (ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph), formerly known as ELT-HIRES, is the high-resolution optical-infrared spectrograph for the ESO/ELT (European Southern Observatory/Extremely Large Telescope) thought to study astronomical objects that require highly sensitive observations. It will be used to search for signs of life in Earth-like exoplanets, find the first stars born in the Universe, test for variations of the fundamental constants of physics, and measure the acceleration of the Universe's expansion.

For the biosignature detection scientific case, ANDES will be able to directly probe exoplanets, by spatially resolving them from their host star, focusing on their reflected star light and taking advantage of the angular resolution of the ELT with AO-assisted observations. To this purpose it will be equipped with a dedicated single conjugate adaptive optics (SCAO) module.

In this talk I’ll briefly present first the ANDES instrument and its project, focusing afterwards on the ANDES SCAO subsystem presenting its capabilities and challenges.

Paolo Di Marcantonio, INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste