The Astralis MAVIS team is pleased to announce that we, along with our European team members, have successfully passed the MAVIS Preliminary Design Review at European Southern Observatory (ESO) on March 30, 2023, pending completion of a few actions. The team has received high praise from the ESO review board for the quality of the documentation, as well as our collaborative spirit and professionalism.
The international MAVIS team gathered either in person or virtually for the MAVIS Preliminary Design Review meeting on March 30th, 2023. Credit: Angelos Tsaousis (ESO)
This is a significant milestone for the MAVIS team and a major accomplishment for the project. Passing the preliminary design review means that the project can move forward to the final design phase. This brings the team one step closer to achieving their ultimate goal of a first light at the end of this decade.
Astralis is leading the design and construction of MAVIS, the $AU55-million adaptive-optics system on the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), one of the world’s most powerful ground-based optical telescopes. As the world’s first multi-conjugate adaptive optics visible imager and spectrograph, MAVIS will be a unique and powerful instrument that will serve a very large number of key science projects.