Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter ATNG

Thursday, 14 September 2023, 15:00   (H 2036)

MARCOT: A new approach to large aperture telescope

Kalaga Madhav (a), Jesús Aceituno (b,c), Martin M. Roth (a), Jośe L. Ortiz (c), Stefan Cikota (b), Thomas Fechner (a), Pedro Amado (c,d), Fran Pozuelos (c), Rafael Luque (c), and Nicolas Morales (c)
(a) Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam, Germany (b) Centro Astronómico Hispano Alemán, Sierra de los Filabres sn , 04550 Gérgal Almería, Spain (c) Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, CSIC, Glorieta de la Astronomía SN, 18008, Granada, Spain (d) Space Sciences, Technologies and Astrophysics Research (STAR) Institute, Université de Liège, 19C Allèe du 6 Août, 4000 Liège, Belgium

The Calar Alto Observatory in Spain operates the Multi Array of Combined Telescope (MARCOT) Pathfinder, a large aperture telescope built using 7 identical low-cost telescopes. The light collected by individual telescopes is combined optically through optical fibers in spectroscopy mode, by using a novel Multi-Mode Photonic Lantern (MM-PL) that is being developed at Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) specifically for MARCOT. The modular segmented-telescope observatory, consisting of commercially available telescopes can be built at a fraction of the cost of building traditional large telescopes, allowing observations that are otherwise too expensive or impractical to conduct on extremely large telescopes (ELTs). MARCOT Pathfinder will be used to validate the conceptual design, predicted performance of MM-PL and is a precursor for MARCOT which is intended to provide CARMENES, with a 5-15m light collecting area. In this talk I will present the overall concept of MARCOT, science cases, the concept of MM-PL, and the preliminary results from the Pathfinder coupled to the Potsdam Multiplex Raman Spectrograph (MRS).