Manuel Collados, EST project coordinator, summarises the main achievements of the European Solar Telescope in the last six months.
EST is making good progress in all the activities the project is addressing and here is again our Newsletter with the latest news.
As a project included in the ESFRI Roadmap, EST volunteered to be monitored in an exercise to follow up its current status. Various aspects were evaluated such as the relevance in a world-wide context, the scientific impact, the use of the most modern technologies, the socio-economic impact in Europe, as well as the perspectives for funding. The evaluation report acknowledged the importance of the project and emphasised that a major bottleneck exists due to the lack of involvement of the funding agencies. The project is working hard to overcome these difficulties so that construction can be started in the shortest possible time. As an intermediate step before an ERIC can be created, different possibilities for an interim legal figure have been analysed. In the coming months, steps will be given towards its creation as a bridge between the present Preparatory Phase and construction.
The EST optical design has been completely revamped after deciding to pursue the option of an adaptive secondary mirror. The optical path has been simplified, leading to a much more efficient telescope. The new concept for the Pier Optical Path, which generates the input focal plane for the instruments, is presented in this issue together with progress made in other relevant areas.
An exciting videogame “Solar Mission EST” is on the way and almost ready to be released. We all are looking forward to playing with it and saving the Earth! This and other outreach activities are described in this issue and on our new website.
All members of the EST consortium hope you are safe in these difficult times and wish you all the best for the coming year 2021, in which we expect normality will come back to our lives.