Successful Commissioning of FORS1 - the First Optical Instrument on the VLT

FORS, the FOcal Reducer/low dispersion Spectrograph, was the first VLT instrument to be designed and built outside ESO. Following a Call for Proposals in 1990, the contract to realise the project was awarded in 1991 to a consortium of three German astronomical institutes (Landessternwarte Heidelberg and the University Observatories of Gottingen and Munich). Due to its large variety of observing modes, a heavy demand for observing time was expected for the envisaged instrument. Therefore, ESO decided from the beginning to order two nearly identical instruments from the consortium. An account of the start of the project is given in [1]. In April 1992 the Preliminary Design Review was held followed by the Final Design Review in February 1994. Immediately afterwards, the consortium started to transform the approved design into hardware. The performance of the instrument and its components was continuously tested in the laboratory during the different stages of Successful Commissioning of FORS1 – the First Optical Instrument on the VLT

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