SOXS (Son Of X-Shooter) is a single object spectrograph built by an international consortium for the ESO NTT telescope. SOXS is based on the heritage of the X-Shooter at the ESO-VLT with two arms (UV-VIS and NIR) working in parallel, with a Resolution-Slit product ≈ 4500, capable of simultaneously observing over the entire band the complete spectral range from the U- to the H-band. SOXS will carry out rapid and long-term Target of Opportunity requests on a variety of astronomical objects. The SOXS vacuum and cryogenic control system has been designed to evacuate, cool down and maintain the UV-VIS detector and the entire NIR spectrograph to their operating temperatures. The design chosen allows the two arms to be operated independently. This paper describes the final design of the cryo-vacuum control system, its functionalities and the tests performed in the integration laboratories.
Narrow-band filters are often used to constrain the chemical composition of astronomical objects through photometry. A challenge to derive accurate photometry is that narrow-band filters are based on interference of multiple reflections and refractions between thin layers of transparent dielectric material. When the light rays reach the surface of a filter not perpendicular to it, they cross the layers obliquely travelling a path longer than the thickness of the layers and different for each inclination. This results in a blue-shift of the central wavelength and a distortion of the transmission curve. Hence, particular care should be taken when narrow band filters are used in presence of small f-numbers and large non-telecentric angles, as frequent in the large field of view (FoV) instruments. Sometimes, the broadening and central wavelength shift of the transmission curve are considered and compensated in the design of filters for instruments with a small f-number. Here we consider the combined effect of small f-number, non-telecentricity and large FoV. Where single spectral lines are considered, a shift in central wavelength or a change in the shape of the transmission curve may introduce an instrumental dispersion in luminosity and in the linked color indices. We found that transmission curves of narrow band filters can be significantly different in shape than the nominal ones. The bottom limits for filters’ effective FWHM for each f-number; the monotonic behavior of the blue-shift with distance from the center of FoV; the monotonic quality decrease of the transmission curves and the photometric dispersion introduced by the filters are computationally estimated. This work could represent a useful tool to evaluate the fitness of a particular filter at a particular facility.
We report the implemented architecture for monitoring the health and the quality of the Son Of X-Shooter (SOXS) spectrograph for the New Technology Telescope in La Silla at the European Southern Observatory. Briefly, we report on the innovative no-SQL database approach used for storing time-series data that best suits for automatically triggering alarm, and report high-quality graphs on the dashboard to be used by the operation support team. The system is designed to constantly and actively monitor the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) metrics, as much automatically as possible, reducing the overhead on the support and operation teams. Moreover, we will also detail about the interface designed to inject quality checks metrics from the automated SOXS Pipeline (Young et al. 2022).
The Son-Of-XShooter (SOXS) is a single object spectrograph (UV-VIS & NIR) and acquisition camera scheduled to be mounted on the European Southern Observatory (ESO) 3.58-m New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory. Although the underlying data reduction processes to convert raw detector data to fully-reduced science ready data are complex and multi-stepped, we have designed the SOXS Data Reduction pipeline with the core aims of providing end-users with a simple-to-use, well-documented command-line interface while also allowing the pipeline to be run in a fully automated state; streaming reduced data into the ESO Science Archive Facility (SAF) without need for human intervention. To keep up with the stream of data coming from the instrument, there is the requirement to optimise the software to reduce each observation block of data well within the typical observation exposure time. The pipeline is written in Python 3 and has been built with an agile development philosophy that includes CI and adaptive planning.
We present development progress of the scheduler for the Son Of X-Shooter (SOXS) instrument at the ESO-NTT 3.58-m telescope. SOXS will be a single object spectroscopic facility, consisting of a two-arms high-efficiency spectrograph covering the spectral range 350-2000 nm with a mean resolving power R≈4500. SOXS will be uniquely dedicated to the UV-visible and near infrared follow up of astrophysical transients, with a very wide pool of targets available from the streaming services of wide-field telescopes, current and future. This instrument will serve a variety of scientific scopes in the astrophysical community, with each scope eliciting its specific requirements for observation planning, that the observing scheduler has to meet. Due to directions from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the instrument will be operated only by La Silla staff, with no astronomer present on the mountain. This implies a new challenge for the scheduling process, requiring a fully automated algorithm that should be able to present the operator not only with and ordered list of optimal targets, but also with optimal back-ups, should anything in the observing conditions change. This imposes a fast-response capability to the scheduler, without compromising the optimization process, that ensures good quality of the observations. In this paper we present the current state of the scheduler, that is now almost complete, and of its web interface.
SOXS (Son Of X-Shooter) will be the new double-armed spectrograph for the ESO NTT at La Silla and it will be optimized to provide an unique specialized facility to follow up and classify any kind of transient events. It consists of a central structure (common path) which supports two spectrographs optimized for the UV-Visible and a Near-IR range. Attached to the common path there is the Acquisition and Guiding Camera System (ACS), equipped with a filter wheel which can provide some science grade imaging and moderate high speed photometry. The project is currently in its Assembly Integration and Verification phase following a modular approach so that each sub-system can be integrated in parallel before their final assembly at system level, foreseen at the INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova (Italy). The optics and the mechanical parts of the ACS arrived in the second semester of 2021, so from that moment the Assembly and Verification Phase began. This work presents the assembly and testing operation of the ACS of SOXS and we report the strategy and the results achieved to meet the requirements.
The Son Of X-Shooter (SOXS) is a single object spectrograph, built by an international consortium for the 3.58-m ESO New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory. It offers a simultaneous spectral coverage over 350-2000 nm, with two separate spectrographs. In this paper we present the progress in the AIT phase of the Near InfraRed (NIR) cryogenic echelle cross-dispersed spectrograph. We describe the different AIT phases of the cryo, vacuum, opto-mechanics and detector subsystems that finally converged at the INAF-OAB premises in Merate (Italy), where the spectrograph is currently being assembled and tested, before the final assembly on SOXS.
FAST (Fully Automatic Spectrograph for Transients) is a low resolution spectrograph (R = 60 and 600 at 6500A) covering a wavelength range from 3800A up to 9200A and it includes an imaging mode. It is intended to be operated at the fully robotic telescope PROMPT-7 (CTIO, Chile) with the aim to obtain efficiently a first spectrum of transient events, without human intervention, in a few minutes after their discovery. The project has just started the manufacturing and procurement phases. In this work we present the final opto-mechanical layout of FAST and we describe its development status.
SOXS (Son Of X-Shooter) is a single object spectrograph offering a simultaneous spectral coverage from U- to H-band, built by an international consortium for the 3.58-m ESO New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory. It is designed to observe all kind of transients and variable sources discovered by different surveys with a highly flexible schedule maintained by the consortium, based on the Target of Opportunity concept. SOXS is going to be a fundamental spectroscopic partner for any kind of imaging survey, becoming one of the premier transient follow-up instruments in the Southern hemisphere. This paper gives an updated status of the project, when the instrument is in the advanced phase of integration and testing in Europe, prior to the activities in Chile.
The Son Of X-Shooter (SOXS) is the new two-channel (UV-VIS and NIR) spectrograph and imaging capabilities, covering wavelength regimes from 350 nm to 2000nm for the ESO NTT at La Silla. SOXS is optimized for the classification and follow-up of transient events. SOXS consortium has a relatively large geographic spread, and therefore the AIV of this medium-class instrument follows a modular approach. Each of the five main sub-systems of SOXS, namely the Common Path, the Calibration Unit, the Acquisition Camera, UV-VIS Spectrograph, and the NIR Spectrograph, are undergoing internal alignment and testing in the respective consortium institutes. INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova delivers the Common Path (CP) sub-system, which is the backbone of the entire instrument. We report the Common Path internal alignment starting from the assembly of the individual components to the final testing of the optical quality and the efficiency of the complete sub-system.
The Son Of X-Shooter (SOXS) is a two-channel spectrograph along with imaging capabilities, characterized by a wide spectral coverage (350nm to 2000nm), designed for the NTT telescope at the La Silla Observatory. Its main scientific goal is the spectroscopic follow-up of transients and variable objects. The UV-VIS arm, of the Common Path sub-system, is characterized by the presence of a powered Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector composed (ADC) by two counter-rotating quadruplets, two prisms, and two lenses each. The presence of powered optics in both the optical groups represents an additional challenge in the alignment procedures. We present the characteristics of the ADC, the analysis after receiving the optics from the manufacturer, the emerging issues, the alignment strategies we followed, and the final results of the ADC in dispersion and optical quality.
SOXS (SOn of X-Shooter) is a high-efficiency spectrograph with a mean Resolution-Slit product of ∼ 3500 over the entire band capable of simultaneously observing the complete spectral range 350-2000 nm. It consists of three scientific arms (the UV-VIS Spectrograph, the NIR Spectrograph and the Acquisition Camera) connected by the Common Path system to the NTT, and the Calibration Unit. We present an overview of the flow from the scientific to the technical requirements, and the realization of the sub-systems. Further, we give an overview of the methodologies used for planning and managing the assembly of the sub-systems, their integration and tests before the acceptance of the instrument in Europe (PAE) along with the plan for the integration of SOXS to the NTT. SOXS could be used as an example for the system engineering of an instrument of moderate complexity, with a large geographic spread of the team.
SOXS (SOn of X-Shooter) is a medium resolution (~4500) wide-band (0.35 - 2.0 µm) spectrograph which passed the Final Design Review in 2018. The instrument is in the final integration phase and it is mainly composed of five different optomechanical subsystems and four other mechanical subsystems (Interface flange, Platform, cable corotator, and cooling system). In this paper, a brief overview of all the subsystems and tools is presented here together with the acceptance results of the various mechanical elements, the experiments performed to validate the functionality of the subsystems, and the mechanical integration procedure.
KEYWORDS: Device simulation, Near infrared, Calibration, Spectrographs, Lamps, Telescopes, Point spread functions, Signal to noise ratio, Optical simulations, Modeling and simulation
We present the progresses of the simulation tools, the Exposure Time Calculator (ETC) and End-to-End simulator (E2E), for the Son Of X-Shooter (SOXS) instrument at the ESO-NTT 3.58-m telescope. The SOXS will be a single object spectroscopic facility, made by a two-arms high-efficiency spectrograph, able to cover the spectral range 350-2000 nm with a mean resolving power R≈4500. While the purpose of the ETC is the estimate, to the best possible accuracy, of the Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR), the E2E model allows us to simulate the propagation of photons, starting from the scientific target of interest, up to the detectors. We detail the ETC and E2E architectures, computational models and functionalities. The interface of the E2E with external simulation modules and with the pipeline are described, too. Synthetic spectral formats, related to different seeing and observing conditions, and calibration frames to be ingested by the pipeline are also presented.
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