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- R. Cirami, V. Baldini, I. Coretti, S. Cristiani, P. Di Marcantonio, M. Mannetta, P. Santin
INAF-OAT, Trieste, Italy
- D. Mégevand
Université de Genève, Observatoire Astronomique, Versoix, Switzerland
- F. Zerbi
INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Merate, Italy
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ESPRESSO is a fiber-fed, cross-dispersed, high-resolution echelle spectrograph for the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT). The instrument is designed to combine incoherently the light coming from up to 4 VLT Unit Telescopes. To ensure maximum stability the spectrograph is placed in a thermal enclosure and a vacuum vessel. Abandoning the VME-based technologies previously adopted for the ESO VLT instruments, the ESPRESSO control electronics has been developed around a new concept based on industrial COTS PLCs. This choice ensures a number of benefits like lower costs and less space and power consumption requirement. Moreover it makes possible to structure the whole control electronics in a distributed way using building blocks available commercially off-the-shelf and minimizing in this way the need for custom solutions. The main adopted PLC brand is Beckhoff, whose product lineup satisfies the requirements set by the instrument control functions. OPC-UA is the chosen communication protocol between the PLCs and the instrument control software, which is based on the VLT Control Software package.
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