VIENTOS: a feasibility study of innovative pupil systems for the new generation of instruments in the large telescopes

The goal of VIENTOS project is to analyze pupil innovative systems that could be used in the new generation of instruments for the large telescopes. This study tries to identify the current scientific needs, to understand why some of them have not been fulfilled yet (due to pre-conceived technical ideas or to managerial reasons) and to propose optomechanical solutions for these pupil elements that could produce a qualitative leap in the performance of the instruments to operate in the large telescopes. VIENTOS is currently on-going as a collaborative project between FRACTAL and the University Complutense of Madrid (UCM) and is being partially funded by a CDTI grant under the program Industry for Science. CDTI is the Development and Industrial Transfer Center from the Minister of Science and Innovation (Spain). Among the different innovative systems that we have carried out, our team has explored potential solutions for narrow band Imaging with tunable filters in the near-IR and a novel pupil system called sliced-pupil grating, a device designed for increasing the spectral resolution in astronomical spectrographs, without changing the geometry of the main optics. Nanotechnology customized filters to be applicable to astronomical systems are under study.