GREST

Project H2020 “GREST – Getting Ready for the EST” is an ongoing project to take the European Solar Telescope to the next level of development by advancing in crucial activities to improve the performance of current state-of-the-art instrumentation. Legal, industrial and socio-economic issues are addressed as key questions for the building of EST.

The particular developments and strategic tasks proposed here can be summarized in the following specific objectives:

1. Boosting new generation detectors, with the development of two prototype sensors, one for large-format imaging and a the other for high-precision polarimetry, the evaluation of an existing large format wavefront sensing camera is also addressed.
2. Development of a capacitance-stabilised Fabry-Perot prototype for a high quality control of the parallelism of the etalon plates;
3. New techniques for 2D solar spectro-polarimetry with integral field units based on multi-slit image slicers or a microlens-fed spectrograph;
4. Development of large format liquid-crystal modulators, required for the large-format sensors that will be needed for the new generation large aperture telescopes.
5. Evaluation of the performance of the EST MCAO deformable mirrors to improve the design and performance of this system; and
6. Strategic work to covering industrial, financial and legal issues related the future construction and operation of EST.

With all these elements in hand, the project will be in the condition to present a definite proposal for detailed design, construction, managing and operation of EST.