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2010 World Cup & Future Of Television ESOcast 1,593 views ESA Podcast: Satellites, TV and the World Cup. --- Please subscribe to Science & Reason: • http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience • http://www.youtube.com/ScienceMagazi...
Newton's Laws Of Motion (3): Action And Reaction ESOcast 22,502 views ESA Science - Newton In Space (Part 3/3): Newton's Third Law of Motion - Action and Reaction. --- Please subscribe to Science & Reason: • http://www.youtube.com/Best0f...
Europe's Spaceport - The Future ESOcast 3,379 views The Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana, is the major European spaceport, with satellite launches that benefit from the location 4 degrees north of the equator. ...
Newton's Laws Of Motion (2) : Force, Mass And Acceleration ESOcast 24,628 views ESA Science - Newton In Space (Part 2): Newton's Second Law of Motion - Force, Mass And Acceleration. Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that form the basi...
Newton's Laws Of Motion (1) : The Law Of Inertia ESOcast 24,213 views ESA Science - Newton In Space (Part 1): Newton's First Law of Motion - The Law of Inertia Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that form the basis for classic...
Highlights Of Space Flight 2009 ESOcast 8,521 views 2009 has been a record breaking year for ESA with 7 launches from 4 different Space Ports! Two ESA astronauts went to the International Space Station: With a Soyuz for F...
A Time Machine To Understand The Evolution Of The Universe ESOcast 12,780 views Planck - A Time Machine To Understand The Evolution Of The Universe. --- • http://www.YouTube.com/ScienceMagazine • http://www.YouTube.com/Best0fScience --- The mo...
A WISE Mission To Study Asteroids And Comets ESOcast 2,783 views A WISE Mission to study Asteroids, Comets and other Objects. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, will scan the entire sky in infrared light, picking up the...
Hubble Falls Into Coma ESOcast 2,659 views Hubble's Universe Unfiltered 02: Hubble Falls Into Coma (Part 2). The Coma Cluster of Galaxies is one of the richest collections of galaxies in the nearby universe. Seve...
Hubble's Universe: Hubble Servicing Missions, Part 2 ESOcast 866 views Hubble's Universe Unfiltered 03: Hubble Servicing Delayed (Part 2). On September 27, 2008, NASA was two weeks away from a space shuttle mission to upgrade and repair the...

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ESOcast

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Jun 13, 2010

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Jun 22, 2009

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ESO is the pre-eminent intergovernmental science and technology organisation in astronomy. It carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities for astronomy to enable important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research.

ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in the Atacama Desert region of Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. ESO's first site is at La Silla, a 2400 m high mountain 600 km north of Santiago de Chile. It is equipped with several optical telescopes with mirror diameters of up to 3.6 metres. The 3.5-metre New Technology Telescope broke new ground for telescope engineering and design and was the first in the world to have a computer-controlled main mirror, a technology developed at ESO and now applied to most of the world's current large telescopes. The ESO 3.6-metre telescope is now home to the world's foremost extrasolar planet hunter: HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher), a spectrograph with unrivalled precision.

While La Silla remains at the forefront of astronomy, and is still the second most scientifically productive in ground-based astronomy, the 2600 m high Paranal site with the Very Large Tele-scope array (VLT) is the flagship facility of European astronomy. Paranal is situated about 130 km south of Antofagasta in Chile, 12 km inland from the Pacific coast in one of the driest areas in the world. Scientific operations began in 1999 and have resulted in many extremely successful research programmes.

The VLT is a most unusual telescope, based on the latest technology. It is not just one, but an array of four telescopes, each with a main mirror of 8.2 metres in diameter. With one such telescope, images of celestial objects as faint as magnitude 30 have been obtained in a one-hour exposure. This corresponds to seeing objects that are four billion times fainter than those seen with the naked eye.

One of the most exciting features of the VLT is the option to use it as a giant optical interferometer (VLT Interferometer or VLTI). This is done by combining the light from several of the telescopes, including one or more of four 1.8-metre moveable Auxiliary Telescopes. In this interferometric mode, the telescope has a vision as sharp as that of a telescope the size of the separation between the most distant mirrors. For the VLTI, this is 200 metres.

Each year, about 2000 proposals are made for the use of ESO telescopes, requesting between four and six times more nights than are available. ESO is the most productive ground-based observatory in the world, which annually results in many peer-reviewed publications: in 2008 alone, 700 refereed papers based on ESO data were published, making ESO the world's most productive astronomical observatory.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the largest ground-based astronomy project in existence, is a revolutionary facility for world astronomy. ALMA will comprise an array of 66 giant 12-metre and 7-metre diameter antennas observing at millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths. Construction of ALMA started in 2003 and it will start scientific observations in 2011. ALMA is located on the high altitude Llano de Chajnantor, at 5000 m elevation — the highest astronomical observatory in the world. The ALMA project is a partnership between Europe, East Asia and North America, in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ESO is the European partner in ALMA. The Chajnantor site is also home to the 12-metre APEX millimetre and submillimetre telescope, operated by ESO on behalf of the Onsala Space Observatory, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and ESO itself.

The next step beyond the VLT is to build a European Extremely Large optical/infrared Telescope (E-ELT) with a primary mirror 42 metres in diameter. The E-ELT will be "the biggest eye on the sky" — the largest optical/near-infrared telescope in the world and ESO is drawing up detailed construction plans together with the community. The E-ELT will address many of the most pressing unsolved questions in astronomy. It may, eventually, revolutionise our perception of the Universe, much as Galileo's telescope did, 400 years ago. The final go-ahead for construction is expected in 2010, with the start of operations planned for 2018.

The ESO headquarters are located in Garching, near Munich, Germany. This is the scientific, technical and administrative centre of ESO where technical development programmes are carried out to provide the observatories with the most advanced instruments. It is also home for the Space Telescope — European Coordinating Facility, operated jointly by ESO and the European Space Agency.
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