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. Over 7000 pages of documentation were delivered in the weeks leading to the review (not sure if the inflation we see in document packages is a good thing, but that’s how it is).

We received close to 1000 RIXes, which were all closed at the end of the review.

Some workpackages need a bit more work to be at FDR level and we will have a closure review sometimes in the second semester 2026.

This is a very significant milestone for the MAVIS team and a major accomplishment for the project. We should be soon in a position to move on to the phase D - manufacturing, integration, assembly and test.

Photo credit: Francois Rigaut

The MAVIS team has had its first busy week with participants from all over the consortium since the start of COVID. A busy week is an event in which a large fraction of the team gets together in one physical place and works exclusively on the project for an extended period of time (in that case, a week). The format is a bit like a workshop or a summer school, except people attend to work rather than learn. There is usually a handful of plenary sessions, and a number of parallel split sessions - up to four in our case.

We had 37 participants from Italy (INAF), Germany (ESO), and Australia (Astralis-AITC and Astralis-AAO). The busy week took place in the Australian Center on China in the World, a beautiful building located on the Acton ANU campus in Canberra. With close to 60 plenary and splinter sessions, we were able to cover and progress many different topics, ranging from management to the most technical subjects, through Product assurance, MAIT, and many many others. Our field is full of acronyms, but I could not help smilling when I attended a session named “MAVIS LPO: CRE, RFW & RfD”. Beside hard work, we also planned some less studious activities: A lunch at Tidbinbilla, a hike to Duffield’s grave and a visit to AITC on the Monday. Below is a photo shot by Brian Taylor at the busy week diner at the QT hotel. This was the first visit to Australia for many of our European colleagues, and they seemed impressed enough!

Most goals from the busy week planning were reached. We have clarified, or have now a clear path to most remaining instrument trade offs. A busy week is a lot of organisation, and is a significant budget investment to move people around -especially in the case of MAVIS with the Aussie-European team-, but it is well worth it in term of the effectiveness of the work resulting from the direct, intensive interactions of the science, technical and managerial teams.

The international MAVIS team gathered either in person or virtually for the MAVIS Preliminary Design Review meeting on March 30th, 2023. 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.

Photo credit: Angelos Tsaousis (ESO)

On the week of May 9-13, we are planning to have a consortium busy week. For a number of reasons, we are not looking at moving the whole Australian team to Europe or vice versa: Instead we will be trying something quite innovative: We will gather the European team somewhere in Italy and the Australian team somewhere away from Sydney and Canberra. Two poles. This way we hope that everyone will be able to shift their schedule more easily than if we were working as usual, and we should have a few good hours of overlap every day. We will see how this goes, but it is definitely following a logical trend of saving on international travel, for environmental reasons, cost, fatigue, etc.

A very warm Thank You to all the participants of the 2021 online MAVIS Science Workshop held last month! We had 140 registrants, with around 60-80 attendees on each of the four 3-hour sessions of talks and fruitful discussions, both live and via the workshop Slack channels. We were extremely pleased to have so much engagement and interest in MAVIS from the community, with many talks presenting new science cases, in addition to synergies with future facilities and updates to the Phase A Science Case.

Missed the workshop? No problem! all talks (live and pre-recorded) and discussion sessions are now available online via the workshop website.

Good things come to those who wait.

Today, Tuesday 1 June 2021, the ESO-ANU agreement for the design and construction of MAVIS was signed by both parties. It comes after a somewhat lengthy but satisfying process to set up the Technical Requirement Specifications and the Statement of Work.

Today, in less than an hour, we will be having the formal Kick-Off meeting with ESO and the MAVIS consortium. This will mostly focus on formal matters (management, system engineering, product assurance), as we’ve had most technical matters discussed on 11 June during a successful pre-kick-off with ESO.

Simultaneously, we are doing several media releases, synchronised across ESO, ANU/Macquarie/AAL and INAF. This is embargoed until 1 June 16:00CET (2 June 00:00 in Australia).

We’re ON. This is a great day for MAVIS.

INFOGRAPHICS:

MAVIS view with subsystem labels:

MAVIS rendering, rotating:

We are please to announce the 2021 MAVIS Science Workshop, which will be fully online, scheduled for July 5-8th!

This workshop aims at bringing together the scientific community and discussing the key science cases where MAVIS will have a strong impact due to its unparalleled capabilities, as well as identifying the areas where it will provide unique synergies with existing and forthcoming facilities such as ELTs and JWST. The workshop is an opportunity to engage the community and push forward the MAVIS project.

More information about the workshop and how to register can be found on the workshop website.

Oz in summer

Half of the team is Australia-based, and summer was in December-February. So many or most of the Australians took vacations over Christmas and part of January. We are lucky that these past months there are very little case of COVID in Oz, so people could essentially move around the country freely, and in particular take advantage of the beach.

Busy week and (semi) official kick start of the phase B activities

Importantly, we had a busy week over the week from March 1-5. It was well attended by most of the team, and we had generally 38-40 people at plenary sessions. With the current 10 hours time difference between Central European Time and Australian Eastern Time, we only had a couple of hours of core overlap, up to 3 some days.

Time was split between a few plenary sessions and many parallel splinter sessions covering topics such as schedule, science, S/W, System Engineering, Product Assurance, Spectrograph/Imager, Detectors, AO Simulations, Cryostats, Mechanical, Optical, DM performance, MAVISSIM, Prototyping, LGS split, Calibration, Truth Sensing, Pipelines and RTC. The last day, we all got back together and went through summaries of all the splinter sessions. It was very productive, but we of course dearly missed the face to face interactions. Hopefully the next one will be a face to face busy week, although this is far from certain.

We ended up with 20 presentations and, as usual, took advantage with google docs for collaborative minute taking (20 pages of minutes). Overall, a very nice meeting; we got the ball rolling again.

Agreement etc

I was announcing in one of the last post that we expected an agreement signature on Feb 26. This got delayed a bit, mostly because getting the applicable documents ready too longer than expected (on the ESO side). A new date for the delivery of these documents is April 2. The agreement signature should happen two weeks after that (April 26), and the Kick Off meeting shortly after that (end of April). Experience has shown that this is overall quite a fragile process, involving many different discipline and levels of administration (including lawyers), and can be brought to a pause by the slightest grain of sand. So consider these dates as indicative. We’ll of course post an update when the agreement is signed.

We are also planning a media release for the signature. Nodes planning media or press releases are ESO, ANU, INAF and probably Macquarie and AAL.

New Logos!

After much interaction, trials, using web designer services, we finally have a new logo. The decision was to go for something simple and modern. Here it is. The version below are all “official” versions. Different colours are for different type of documents - the ones on the right are for dark themes.

1. MAVIS: System modelling and performance prediction (Agapito et al)
2. MAVIS IFU with AO for VLT: image slicer concept and design (Content et al)
3. Predictive Learn and Apply: MAVIS Application - Apply (Cranney et al)
4. MAVIS: science case, imager and spectrograph (Ellis et al)
5. MAVIS real-time control system: a high-end implementation of the COSMIC platform (Gratadour et al)
6. Optical design of a broadband atmospheric dispersion corrector for MAVIS (Greggio et al)
7. MAVIS Adaptive Optics Module Optical Design (Greggio et al)
8. The MAVIS Image Simulator: predicting the astrometric performance of MAVIS (Monty et al)
9. MAVIS Conceptual Design (Rigaut et al)
10. MAVIS: Conceptual architecture of the Instrument Control Software (Salasnich et al)
11. MAVIS: the adaptive optics module feasibility study (Viotto et al)
12. Predictive Learn and Apply: MAVIS application - Learn (Zhang et al)