Timeline


2016Science survey start (January), Final acceptance (June...)
2015 • Front-end commissionning in Calar Alto (April-June), First light and commissioning of VIS spectrograph (October), First light and commissioning of NIR spectrograph (November), Science commissioning (November-December), Preliminary acceptance at Calar Alto (December)
2014 • NIR and VIS calibration units acceptance in Tautenburg (June) and opto-mechanics manufacture, assembly, integration and verification
2013 • CARMENES Final Design Review in Granada (February) and optics and detector purchase
2012 • CARMENES Optics Final Design Review (April)
2011 • Agreement for the CARMENES instrument for Calar Alto (February), CARMENES Preliminary Design Review in Madrid (July)
2010 • Calar Alto green light (May), CARMENES post-Conceptual Design Review in Granada (July), Phase-B Kick-off Meeting in Granada (December)
2009 • Calar Alto design studies decision (January), Phase-A Kick-off Meeting in Heidelberg and project start (February), CARMENES+XMS Conceptual Design Review in Granada (October)
2008 • Call for letters of intent for the construction of the next generation instrument for CAHA 3.5m telescope (March), Calar Alto instrumentation Workshop in Granada (June), Proposal for a High-Resolution Near-Infrared and Optical Spectrograph for Calar Alto (December)


2016

10 Jan 2015: CARMENES in La Vanguardia

08 Jan 2015: CARMENES in Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung

05 Jan 2015: CARMENES in El Séptimo Cielo

01-13 Jan 2016: First GTO science survey run



2015

22 Dec 2015: article on CARMENES by Pedro J. Amado in the 2015-2015 winter "Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Astronomía"

21 Dec 2015: press release outcome (CARMENES with Brazilian-Portuguese accent)

17 Dec 2015: coordinated first-light PRESS RELEASE

10 Dec 2015: CARMENES at Calar Alto Observatory (languages: kr, jp)

01 Dec 2015: Avances del proyecto CARMENES in AstronomíA (José A. Caballero)

15 Nov 2015: CARMENES at Calar Alto Observatory by Historias de Luz (languages: es, en, de, fr, cn)

01 Nov 2015: Avances del proyecto CARMENES in AstronomíA (José A. Caballero)

21 Oct 2015: José A. Caballero's talk at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias: "First light of CARMENES, the Calar Alto exoplanet hunter"

15 Oct 2015: Commissioning of the CARMENES optical spectrograph (VIS COM#1)

01 Oct 2015: Avances del proyecto CARMENES in AstronomíA (José A. Caballero)

22 Sep 2015: José A. Caballero's talk at the Centro de Astrobiología, Torrejón de Ardoz: "First light of CARMENES, the Calar Alto exoplanet hunter"

16 Sep 2015: Fifth NIR channel cryo-vacuum cycle (CVC5)

02-03 Sep 2015: VIS channel re-integration

01-04 Sep 2015: VIS calibration unit (and F-P etalon) re-integration

01 Sep 2015: Avances del proyecto CARMENES in AstronomíA (José A. Caballero)

17 Aug 2015: Arrival of the VIS channel opto-mechanics and calibration unit

13 Aug 2015: VIS spectrograph on its way to CAHA unit

10 Aug 2015: CVC4 (fourth cryo-vacuum cycle) of the NIR channel at IAA

02 Aug 2015: Third front-end commissioning run (Josep Guàrdia and Francesc Vilardell)

31 Jul 2015: One of the first real images with cooled NIR channel at IAA and all opto-mechanical components in place

09 Jul 2015: cleaning of the VIS vacuum tank

09 Jul 2015: Expresion of interest to host Marie Curie Fellows interested in our exoplanet search project with CARMENES (at IAA)
The objective of the call MSCA Individual Fellows is to enhance the creative and innovative potential of experienced researchers who wish to diversify their individual competence in terms of skill acquisition through advanced training, international and inter-sectorial mobility. Individual Fellowships provide opportunities to acquire and transfer new knowledge and to work on research in a European context or outside Europe. This scheme also supports the return and reintegration of researchers from outside Europe who have previously worked here. It also develops or helps to restart the careers of individual researchers that show great potential, considering their experience.

06 Jul 2015: VIS vacuum tank arrives Calar Alto

02 Jul 2015: VIS vacuum tank departs from Königstuhl

01 Jul 2015: Avances del proyecto CARMENES in AstronomíA (José A. Caballero)

23-28 Jun 2015: Front-end commissioning, second run (FE-COM#0.2)

12 Jun 2015: Fabry-Pérot etalons optical bench at Calar Alto

09 Jun 2015: 4th face-to-face CARMENES Core Management Team at UCM, Madrid

01 Jun 2015: Avances del proyecto CARMENES in AstronomíA (José A. Caballero)

20 May 2015: Fabry-Pérot etalons optical bench at Calar Alto

18 May 2015: fully-assembled NIR optical bench during AIV phase at IAA

14 May 2015: NIR and VIS pipeline GUI computers in temporary location

07 May 2015: CARMENES for the UCM students of the Master of Astrophysics

01 May 2015: Avances del proyecto CARMENES in AstronomíA (José A. Caballero)

30 Apr-03 May 2015: Front-end commissioning, first run (FE-COM#0.1)

29 Apr 2015: Installation of front-end at the 3.5m Cassegrain focus and first night-sky image with the A&G system

27-28 Apr 2015: front-end re-assembly, integration and installation, and fibres deployment

23 Apr 2015: Front-end in the 3.5m laboratory

21-22 Apr 2015: Jose's visit to Landessternwarte Königstuhl Heidelberg (sponsored by Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung)

21 Apr 2015: NIR rack cabinet

17 Apr 2015: NIR detector and continuous-flow cryostat departs from Königstuhl

14 Apr 2015: NIR detector and continuous-flow cryostat ready for acceptance

01 Apr 2015: Avances del proyecto CARMENES in AstronomíA (José A. Caballero)

27 Mar 2015: rehearsal of the CARMENES soundtrack in Sala El Sol, Madrid

20 Mar 2015: new NIR-channel real and forward-simulated spectra of a Fabry-Pérot etalon and a U-Ne hollow-cathode lamp

17 Mar 2015: Jose's visit to Institut für Astrophysik Göttingen (sponsored by Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung)

12 Mar 2015: a customized "CARMENES" four-port long-cable USB hub

06 Mar 2015: Front-end attached to a telescope simulator at MPIA

05 Mar 2015: VIS channel electronics at LSW

04 Mar 2015: a custom-made steel rack for arranging the plastic curtain strips of the CAHA coudé room clean-shower tent

01 Mar 2015: Avances del proyecto CARMENES in AstronomíA (José A. Caballero)

25 Feb 2015: VIS channel initial alignment completed

25 Feb 2015: CAB-CSIC adhesive labels at CAHA

20 Feb 2015: preparation of CVC1 (first NIR cryo-vacuum cycle) at IAA

20 Feb 2015: all opto-mechanical elements on VIS optical bench at LSW

17 Feb 2015: van Biesbroeck (vb), the GTO data server at CAB-Villafranca

11 Feb 2015:The CARMENES Core Management Team visits the IAA clean room (by José. A. Caballero and Marisa García-Vargas)

10 Feb 2015: 3rd CARMENES Core Management Team face-to-face meeting, Granada

09 Feb 2015: José A. Caballero's visit to Calar Alto

05 Feb 2015: Visit of the CSIC vicepresidency to IAA and CARMENES lab

01 Feb 2015: Avances del proyecto CARMENES in AstronomíA (José A. Caballero)

29 Jan 2015: ICS and pipeline computers and switch being mounted on the CARMENES rack in the 3.5m building (shared with some PANIC computers at the bottom)... Or is it a Dell commercial?

20 Jan 2015: Job at Institut für Astrophysik Göttingen

20 Jan 2015: tricks to mount the Fibre Input Units

01 Jan 2015: Christmas pictures by Eike W. Guenther at Calar Alto under excellent weather conditions (seeing 0.54 arcsec in V)

01 Jan 2015: Avances del proyecto CARMENES in AstronomíA (José A. Caballero)



2014

  • 19 Dec 2014: The CARMENES team at IAA wishes you merry christmas and a happy first light year

  • 11 Dec 2014: The NIR and VIS cross-disperser mounts arrive to IAA and LSW from IAC


  • 27 Nov 2014: The gold-coated NIR collimator mirror at IAA, Granada

  • 17 Nov 2014: Two monitors for kapteyn, one of the 14 CARMENES computers in Calar Alto

  • 01 Nov 2014: CARMENES: el cazador de exoplanetas de Calar Alto, an outreach article in Spanish by José A. Caballero in AstronomíA magazine

  • 14-17 Oct 2014: 2nd science and 6th technical joint meeting at ICE, Barcelona

  • 10 Oct 2014: The NIR and VIS collimator mirrors finished to be polished and coated by Winlight Optics

  • 07 Oct 2014: The 3.5 m telescope coudé room is being refurbished by Ecofred to accommodate CARMENES

  • 02 Oct 2014: The VIS optical bench arrives LSW

  • 01 Oct 2014: The CSIC deputy vice-president of scientific and technological areas Miguel Ángel Bañares and the CSIC delegate in Andalucía, Miguel Ferrer, visit CARMENES at IAA

  • 11 Sep 2014: The NIR camera, made by Winlight, ready for installing its optics (IAA)

  • 25 Aug 2014: The NIR CalUnit, made in Tautenburg, starts its trip to Granada (IAA/TLS)


  • 30 Jun 2014: AIV of NIR vacuum tank, Pfeiffer pumps, CAHA interlocks, N2GPU and test facility also operate nicely in the IAA instrument assembly room (IAA)

  • 16 Jun 2014: NTG VIS vacuum tank, Pfeiffer pumps and CAHA interlocks operate nicely in the MPIA instrument assembly room (LSW/MPIA/CAHA/IAG)

  • 13 Jun 2014: The recently-born pipeline computers, lalande and barnard, now have "CARMENES wallpapers" (IAG/CAHA)

  • 13 Jun 2014: First image of the science CCD while being cooling down (Fractal/UCM/LSW)

  • 09-13 Jun 2014: Quirrenbach (13MB), Alonso-Floriano (2.5MB), Cortés-Contreras (1.5MB) and Montes (2.3MB) posters at CoolStars18, Flagstaff AZ (CAB-UCM); see David Montes' pictures

  • 05-06 and 12 Jun 2014: successful integration tests between the Instrument Control System and the 3.5 m Calar Telescope, first, and the calibration units, next

  • 12 Jun 2014: Calar Alto and CARMENES, Jesús Aceituno and Antonio Arias in Radio3 (Hoy empieza todo: Estrellas, satélites y otros cuerpos)

  • 11 Jun 2014: VIS camera (manufactured by FISBA, Switzerland) is accepted!

  • 11 Jun 2014: CARMENES in YouTube (Andreas Quirrenbach sends greetings from the Cool Stars 18 meeting in Flagstaff, AZ, for the joint CALIFA-CARMENES large surveys event on Calar Alto)

  • 11 Jun 2014: De CALIFA a CARMENES: Futuras grandes exploraciones del cielo desde Calar Alto (IAA press release)

  • 06 Jun 2014: The calibration units 'trailer' in YouTube; see also our webcam in Tautenburg, only on 06 Jun 09:00-12:00 (TLS)

  • 04 Jun 2014: Ancient worlds around Kapteyn's star: Guillem Anglada-Escudé and other ten CARMENES members in an international team discover a cold and a temperate super-Earth orbiting the nearest halo red-dwarf (PHL, IAA, Sad Kapteyn)

  • 02 Jun 2014: The VIS vacuum tank arrives Heidelberg; the NIR vacuum tank starts its trip to Granada (IAG)

  • 30 May 2014: De CALIFA a CARMENES: Futuras grandes exploraciones del cielo desde Calar Alto (IAA)

  • 09 May 2014: The VIS Calibration Unit makes its trip from Tautenburg to Heidelberg, is re-integrated and accepted by LSW (TLS)


  • 05 May 2014: CARMENES assembly phase begins at IAA and CAHA: press releases at RTVE, CAHA (in English) and IAA, and in YouTube

  • 25 Apr 2014: Postdoctoral position on laser optics and frequency standards: at the IAG Göttingen, for doctors in Physics (Reiners)

  • 23 Apr 2014: Image-slicer tests: (carried out in February) with four beam-splitter image-slicer units and two different optical contacts, with and without epoxy, under very low temperature and pressure (Pérez)


  • 28 Mar 2014: Assembly of the NIR detector head at the MPIA: test installation of the pre-amplifier boards on the reverse side of the head and of the detector dummy on the front side of the head (Panduro, Mundt, Mall, Hermann)


  • 18 Feb 2014: CARMENES starts taking shape: one of the two main vacuum tanks before hole drilling and polishing at the NTG Neue Technologien GmbH & Co. KG factory in Gelnhausen, Germany


  • 10 Feb 2014: CARMENES in Barcelona: "5th technical meeting: AIV progress"
  • 03 Feb 2014: in Garching...: "Exoplanet Observations with the E-ELT 2014"

  • 22 Jan 2014: The CARMENES soundtrack in TV: Antonio Arias and Soleá Morente in "Los conciertos de Radio 3 en La 2", min 22:45


  • 18 Jan 2014: and in Forbes!: "On The Hunt For The Very Nearest Alien Earths"
  • 17 Jan 2014: Richardson Gratings produces large mosaic echelle grating for planet-finder spectrograph (HzPF)

    2013

  • 24 Dec 2013: Merry Christams and a happy New Year from Andreas Quirrenbach: [...] One year ago I wrote that 2013 would be an exciting year for us all. Well, as we know now, the year was a lot more exciting than we had imagined, and a lot more exciting than we would have liked. I thank you all who kept on going with an excellent team spirit in spite of adverse circumstances, which put a lot of strain on our project. We have achieved a number of important milestones, from passing the Final Design Review early in the year to "first calibration light" in Tautenburg very recently. We have received a fair number of parcels containing components and sub-systems, and are looking forward to more shipments and to putting everything together in the coming months. Activities at Calar Alto are also progressing. The coudé room will be prepared for CARMENES as soon as winter weather is behind us, and we expect to install, test, and commission the front end at the telescope in mid-2014. Data reduction software is being written, and our science program is taking shape. With all work packages running in high gear, I am confident that we are on track towards a successful completion of the instrument [...]
  • 19 Dec 2013: Gaia en route to L2!
  • 19 Dec 2013: Decision on i-LINK+ CSIC programme for the promotion of scientific international collaboration of CSIC with foreign institutions: the IAA, ICE and CAB have been awarded with 30,000 EUR, mostly for travel costs and daily allowances

  • 17 Dec 2013: First light of the VIS calibration unit in Tautenburg: first light of the VIS calibration unit with the Th-Ne lamps and Fabry-Pérot etalon inputs at the Coudé Échelle Spectrograph of the 2 m Alfred-Jensch Teleskop in the Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg [for Back to the Future fans]


  • 12 Nov 2013: CARMENES: the first and only astronomical instrument with a soundtrack
  • 04 Nov 2013: CFHT confirms participation in funding SPIRou

  • 02 Oct 2013: CSFS = CARMENES Spectral Forward Simulator: VIS- and NIR-channel synthetic spectra of Phoenix models of star with Teff = 3000 K and of U-Ne lamp


  • Oct 2013: Job offer for an engineer in Heidelberg
  • Oct 2013: Signed contract with NTG for manufacturing the main vacuum tanks
  • 15-20 Jul 2013: CARMENES at "Protostars & Planets VI"
  • 11 Jun 2013: Pictures of the NIR detector array at MPIA

  • Apr 2013: Monthly Planet No. 3 (2013 Mar-Apr)


  • Mar 2013: Monthly Planet No. 2 (2013 Feb-Mar)


  • Jan 2013: Monthly Planet No. 1 (2013 Jan)


    2012

  • 20 Aug 2012: GIANO, the new near-infrared échelle spectrograph at the TNG, sees its first light
  • 02 Jul 2012: CARMENES at the CoolStars17 in Barcelona: posters by Amado et al., Caballero et al., Béjar et al., Alonso-Floriano et al., Sairam et al.
  • 26 Apr 2012: three important events close in time: purchase order of the two échelle grating mosaics (last week), delivery of the documentation set for the optics-Final Design Review (this week) and the Sixth CARMENES meeting in Heidelberg (next week)
  • 28 Mar 2012: Many Billions of Rocky Planets in the Habitable Zones around Red Dwarfs in the Milky Way. "A new result from ESO's HARPS planet finder shows that rocky planets not much bigger than Earth are very common in the habitable zones around faint red stars. The international team estimates that there are tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and probably about one hundred in the Sun's immediate neighbourhood. This is the first direct measurement of the frequency of super-Earths around red dwarfs, which account for 80% of the stars in the Milky Way"
  • 06 Feb 2012: Job offers. CARMENES-IAA (Granada) and CARMENES-UCM (Madrid) offer two pre-doctoral fellowships (FPI) for completing a PhD degree (more details) and CARMENES-CAB (Madrid) offers one contract for a computer engineer for developing the VO archive (more details)
  • 02 Feb 2012: CARMENES becomes the first ground-telescope instrument with a soundtrack: "CARMENES live at Calar Alto" by •unitedsoundsofcosmos: astroconcert video in YouTube, mp3 audio file, lyrics and details of our song

    2011

  • 10 Dec 2011: Over 40 of us will meet from 12 to 14 Dec 2011 at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Granada, during the Fifth CARMENES meeting
  • 28 Nov 2011: On Friday last week, Andreas (our PI) gave an interesting talk on CARMENES at the MPIA & LSW Hauskolloquium and on next Thursday, Jose (our co-PM) with •unitedsoundsofcosmos will broadcast via streaming a rock astroconcert from the 0.8 m Schmidt telescope in Calar Alto
  • 03 Nov 2011: The Vuelta a España starts next week: Holger, Jose and Reinhard will visit the CARMENES Spanish institutions in Barcelona, Granada, Calar Alto, Torrejón de Ardoz and Madrid in only five days. Who will win the red jersey?
  • 12 Oct 2011: CARMENES travels around the world: since the PDR, we have held internal meetings, given colloquia or participated in international workshops in Madrid, Heidelberg, Potsdam, Göttingen, Hamburg, Jena and... Sydney and the Siding Spring observatory in Australia!
  • 25 Jul 2011: we passed the Preliminary Design Review! See some pictures of the panel board and the consortium members in action
  • 06 Jun 2011: we are very busy preparing the documentation to be delivered soon to the board of examiners of our Preliminary Design Review. They will be worlwide experts in astronomical instrumentation in general and high-resolution spectroscopy in particular: H. R. A. Jones, J.-L. Lizon, L. Pasquini, L. Ramsey and G. Raskin
  • 07 May 2011: a soundtrack for an astronomical instrument? Yes! The Spanish musician Antonio Arias is producing a new Kraftwerk-like song, CARMENES, which will be premiered in the CosmoCaixa museum in Barcelona on Saturday 14 May 2011. More details of the project at •unitedsoundsofcosmos (in Spanish)
  • 06 Apr 2011: technical meeting on 11-12 Apr 2011 in Madrid for the preparation of the Preliminary Design Review in Jul 2011; the project is paced at a breathtaking speed!
  • 01 Mar 2011: carmenes.caha.es is born! New web domain, hosted at CAHA. A simple, minimalist, pretty web page with more get-at-able information and space for storage

    2010



    2009