On December 1, ESO signed an agreement with a large international consortium for the design and construction of the Multi-Object Spectrograph (MOSAIC), an instrument for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), with a significant contribution from LAM. Capable of measuring light from more than two hundred sources simultaneously, MOSAIC will be used to trace the growth of galaxies and the distribution of matter from the Big Bang to the present day.
The ESO press release: https://www.eso.org/public/unitedkingdom/announcements/ann25008/?lang
The role of France and LAM in MOSAIC:
On instrumental development: MOSAIC is the only instrumental project on the ELT for which France is responsible and for which CNRS-INSU is the lead institute. French laboratories (LAM, UNIDIA/LUX, IRAP, and LAGRANGE) are heavily involved, with responsibilities at the project, science, systems, and subsystems levels. More specifically, we have several responsibilities at LAM, such as PI (Principal Investigator): Roser Pello, the French manager and Project Manager of the “Front End Channel,” the managers of the NIR spectrograph optics, the AITV manager, the Observation Software (SSO) manager, and the NIR Channel Scientist.
On Science: Numerous scientific projects will be developed with MOSAIC/ELT, ranging from the study of the first galaxies formed in the universe to the faintest stars in the local universe, involving a large scientific community. MOSAIC relies on a scientific team of more than 250 people, spread across 14 countries and organized around five main themes, namely: i) first galaxies and cosmic reionization; ii) mass budget in the universe and distribution of dark matter; iii) assembly of galaxies throughout cosmic ages; iv) stellar populations and astro-archeology; v) transient universe and multi-messenger astronomy. LAM has three consortium-level coordinators for the above themes, namely N. Laporte (i), Mat Pieri (ii) and D. Porquet (v). MOSAIC will play a unique role in all of these themes. The consortium has decided to dedicate all of the guaranteed time to conducting combined surveys, thanks to the instrument’s simultaneous observation modes, thereby broadening the impact of the results that can be obtained with MOSAIC.
Contacts LAM
Samuel Boissier
Correspondant communication
Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille
Marseille, France
Tel : +33 7 72 31 78 09
Email: samuel.boissier@lam.fr
Thierry Botti (contact presse pour la France)
Réseau de diffusion scientifique de l’ESO et Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille
Marseille, France
Tél: +33 4 12 23 19 92
Courriel: eson-france@eso.org
