S. Becerril, E. Mirabet, J. L. Lizon, M. Abril, C. Cárdenas, I. Ferro, R. Morales, D. Pérez, A. Ramón, M. A. Sánchez-Carrasco, A. Quirrenbach, P. Amado, I. Ribas, A. Reiners, J. A. Caballero, W. Seifert, J. Herranz. 2016. CARMENES-NIR channel spectrograph cooling system AIV: thermo-mechanical performance of the instrument. Conference on Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation II, DOI: 10.1117/12.2232322
CARMENES is the new high-resolution high-stability spectrograph built for the 3.5m telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory (CAHA, Almeria, Spain) by a consortium formed by German and Spanish institutions. This instrument is composed by two separated spectrographs: VIS channel (550-1050 nm) and NIR channel (9501700 nm). The NIR-channel spectrograph’s responsible is the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (IAACSIC). It has been manufactured, assembled, integrated and verified in the last two years, delivered in fall 2015 and commissioned in December 2015.
One of the most challenging systems in this cryogenic channel involves the Cooling System. Due to the highly demanding requirements applicable in terms of stability, this system arises as one of the core systems to provide outstanding stability to the channel Really at the edge of the state-of-the-art, the Cooling System is able to provide to the cold mass (-1 Ton) better thermal stability than few hundredths of degree within 24 hours (goal: 0.01K/day).
The present paper describes the Assembly, Integration and Verification phase (AIV) of the CARMENES-NIR channel Cooling System implemented at IAA-CSIC and later installation at CAHA 3.5m Telescope, thus the most relevant highlights being shown in terms of thermal performance. The CARMENES NIR-channel Cooling System has been implemented by the IAA-CSIC through very fruitful collaboration and involvement of the ESO (European Southern Observatory) cryo-vacuum department with Jean-Louis Lizon as its head and main collaborator. The present work sets an important trend in terms of cryogenic systems for future E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope) large-dimensioned instrumentation in astrophysics.
