Final design of the ELT's METIS instrument completed

The Mid-infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph, or METIS, has passed its Final Design Review, with ESO now giving the go-ahead on the manufacturing of all instrument components. METIS is a sophisticated multi-tool instrument that will operate on ESO’s upcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). It is the first of the ELT instruments to formally pass its Final Design Review, marking an important step for the METIS consortium, the ELT project, and the instrument-building community.

METIS is a first-generation instrument on the world’s biggest eye on the sky, the ELT, meaning it will start operating when or shortly after the telescope itself starts observing the skies. It has a broad range of science goals, from probing the formation history of our Solar System to peering into the centre of galaxies, to studying their enigmatic supermassive black holes. The main scientific focus of METIS is on the study of planet-forming discs, and recently formed — as well as nearby — exoplanets.

The design process is one step in the journey from a concept to a realised instrument, which takes years to complete for such large, complex, and technologically advanced instruments. METIS passed its first design milestone at its Preliminary Design Review in 2020, while in late 2022, the design of the main instrument components was finalised. Now, with the official completion of the METIS Final Design Review, the consortium can begin the manufacturing phase for all of the instrument’s components. The closure of this review marks the exciting transition from METIS being described in documents to being constructed, assembled and tested.

METIS is designed to observe in the mid-infrared, making it ideal to study cold objects or those enshrouded in dust. While very hot objects at thousands of degrees like our Sun emit mostly visible light, colder ones like planets or dust clouds radiate mostly in the mid-infrared. By analysing light in this frequency range, METIS will study how stars and planets form within dust and gas clouds, and can peer through the dust at the centre of galaxies to study their supermassive black holes. In addition, METIS is expected to make exciting contributions to the field of exoplanets by observing small, rocky exoplanets and investigating the temperature, weather, and chemical composition of their atmospheres in the search for habitable worlds.

METIS is a powerful three-in-one instrument. It has a camera to capture images of the sky, a spectrograph to split the light into its component colours or wavelengths, and its own adaptive optics module to correct for the disrupting turbulence in the atmosphere, working in tandem with the ELT’s adaptive telescope mirrors.The entire instrument will be encased in a cryostat, keeping the instrument at minus 230 degrees Celsius or less so its own heat doesn’t interfere with the infrared measurements.

To learn more about METIS and its people, engineering, and science, watch ‘Meet METIS, a multi-tool instrument for the ELT’.

More Information

The METIS consortium consists of NOVA (Netherlands Research School for Astronomy represented by the University of Leiden, The Netherlands), the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA, based in Heidelberg, Germany), the University of Cologne (Germany), the UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UKATC, in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK), the KU Leuven (Belgium), the Paris Saclay research center of the CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, France), Center for Astrophysics and Gravitation (CENTRA, University of Lisbon, Portugal), ETH Zürich (Switzerland), A* (an Austrian partnership represented by the University of Vienna, the University of Innsbruck, the University of Graz, the University of Linz, and RICAM Linz, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria), the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (United States), Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taipei (Taiwan), and the Université de Liège (Belgium), with contributions from ESO.

Courtesy of European Southern Observatory