Technical Division

After the Schwarzschildhaus, a new building for research and technology, went into operation in March 2000, the AIP has an excellent position for the development of ground-based large aperture telescopes, focal plane instrumentation, and observatories in space. PMAS was the first instrument build at the AIP and is now in routine operation at the 3.5m Calar Alto telescope in Spain. Current projects include the AGW units for the Large Binocular Telescope, the 1.2m robotic telescopes STELLA-I and STELLA-II, the 80cm RoboTel, the spectropolarimeter PEPSI, the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer MUSE, and the solar telescope GREGOR. Currently planned projects concern the 2nd Generation VLT instrumentation including the proposals for CHEOPS and X-SHOOTER.

The Schwarzschildhaus offers, along with a suite of offices for scientists in the first floor, a modern mechanical workshop with state-of-the art machines, including an assembly hall and storage space, an office for mechanical design with 3 CAD workstations, an electronics lab consisting of 3 rooms, a detector lab, a class-4 clean room, an optical lab with 3 separate rooms which can be combined to form a single large laboratory, a faraday cage for the testing of optical and IR detector systems, the computer center for supercomputers and central network services, and associated rooms for support, operations, and archiving.

The GALLERY provides an overview of the facilities available for Research & Development projects at AIP.