AMBER Task Force February 2008 run report

TL;DR

This report details the February 2008 efforts by the AMBER Task Force to diagnose and improve the instrument's performance at the VLTI, aiming to meet its initial specifications for scientific objectives.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of AMBER's technical issues and progress towards fulfilling its contractual performance specifications.

Findings

Identified key technical limitations affecting performance

Proposed corrective actions to meet specifications

Assessed current instrument status and limitations

Abstract

AMBER was installed in March 2004 in the VLTI focal lab of the VLT observatory in Cerro Paranal run by ESO. Since then, there have been 4 commissioning runs and additional VLTI infrastructure installed (IRIS, FINITO and ATs,...), but AMBER is not yet fulfilling all its initial specifications and some important primary science objectives cannot be achieved. At the consortium level, an action plan has been decided in Oct 2007 that created an AMBER Task Force (ATF) to understand and possibly cure the eventual technical issues. The objectives of the February 2008 run was mainly to bring AMBER into contractual specifications the accuracy of the absolute visibility, of the differential and of the closure phase through a fundamental analysis of the instrument status and limitations. This report is the official report of the AMBER Task Force.