THE E-ELT DESIGN REFERENCE MISSION

DRM Workshop

20-21 May 2008
ESO Garching

 

First Announcement

20 Feb 2008

The European ELT is now in the detailed design phase. Work has begun on a Design Reference Mission (DRM), consisting of a set of observing proposals generated from the science case, and corresponding simulated data. The DRM is being used to aid technical design choices and to ensure that the telescope meets the scientific needs of the community as much as possible. The DRM is based on the following "prominent science cases" selected by the Science Working Group:

• Planets & Stars
  • From giant to terrestrial exoplanets: detection, characterization and evolution
  • Circumstellar disks
  • Young clusters and the Initial Mass Function
• Stars & Galaxies
  • Imaging and spectroscopy of resolved stellar populations in galaxies
  • Black holes and AGN
• Galaxies & Cosmology
  • The physics of high redshift galaxies
  • First light - the highest redshift galaxies
  • Is the low-density intergalactic medium metal enriched?
  • A dynamical measurement of the expansion history of the Universe

We will be holding a two-day DRM workshop, open to the community, to exchange ideas on the DRM process. This will allow the community to learn about progress to date and to exchange experience and techniques in simulating data, building exposure time calculators and defining metrics used to evaluate the quality of simulations. We expect to provide an introduction to the simulation work being carried out at ESO, and to make available a set of simulated E-ELT point-spread functions.

There will be presentations describing recent work on the DRM, and we encourage contributed talks from the community, particularly concerning simulations of ELT performance.

We are contacting you because you previously expressed interest in this activity and/or you are involved in an ELT instrument study. Please circulate this to others who may be interested.

The meeting is part of the EU FP7 "ELT Preparatory Phase" program. Travel funding is available for a limited number of participants.

If you are interested in attending then please help us estimate numbers by completing the short form below and emailing it to Isobel Hook (imh@astro.ox.ac.uk), preferably before 29th February.

We look forward to hearing from you,

Isobel Hook
Joe Liske
Markus Kissler-Patig

Name

email address

Would you like to give a presentation? If so, on what topic?

Do you require funding? (if so, how much? Preference will be given to those who do not have other funding sources to attend the meeting).

P.S. Please also note that there will be a more general meeting on ELT science at the JENAM meeting in Vienna in September 2008, see http://www.cosmic-matter.org/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=6 and http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/eelt/science/meetings/jenam08/.