Paranal Observatory will receive a made-in-Portugal telescope

The Paranal Observatory, in the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is part of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), will receive a telescope made in Portugal in 2025, to observe the Sun.

PoET (Paranal solar Espresso Telescope) “is being entirely developed by Portugal, both in terms of hardware and software”, says Alexandre Cabral, PoET project manager at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA). The professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (CIÊNCIAS) adds: “This development is the results of the capabilities that the IA instrumentation group has acquired over the last decade, consolidated with the participation in several instruments for ESO. It is a milestone that has always been desired by IA and that will certainly lead us to future international collaborations on this topic”.

PoET is already in the final design phase and construction of the dome at the Paranal Observatory should begin later this year, with the telescope installation planned for before next summer. Although it will be physically located at the Paranal Observatory, PoET will be operated remotely from IA. Therefore, the IA team is already preparing the scientific exploration of the data that will be collected. This includes several researchers and doctoral students from various areas, ranging from exoplanet research to solar and stellar physics.

Nuno Cardoso Santos, of IA and the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (FCUP) and principal investigator of PoET, comments: “The signing of the contract with ESO was a fundamental step in the development of the FIERCE project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC)”. The FIERCE project (FInding Exo-eaRths: tackling the ChallengEs of stellar activity) seeks to tackle the problem of stellar noise from a new angle, noise that greatly limits the search for and the characterization of other Earths in the Universe.

The IA strategy in the area of searching for and studying exoplanets, currently being fully implemented with the ESPRESSO spectrograph and the CHEOPS space mission (ESA), will continue over the coming years. The results of the FIERCE project will be essential for the success of future space instruments and missions, with strong involvement of the IA, which aim to detect and characterize other Earths, such as ESA’s PLATO and ARIEL space missions, scheduled for launch in 2026 and 2029, respectively, and the ANDES spectrograph, which is expected to become fully operational in the early 2030s, when it is installed on the largest next-generation telescope, the ELT (ESO).