Son of X--Shooter: a multi--band instrument for a multi--band universe

TL;DR

SOXS is a versatile multi-band spectrograph and imager for the ESO 3.5 m telescope, enabling broad astronomical research from solar system objects to distant gamma-ray bursts.

Contribution

It introduces a new multi-band instrument with dual spectrographs and an imager, designed for comprehensive astronomical observations across a wide wavelength range.

Findings

Passed Preliminary Design Review in July 2017

Completed Final Design with FDR in July 2018

Designed for broad scientific applications from solar system to cosmology

Abstract

Son Of X-Shooter (SOXS) will be a new instrument designed to be mounted at the Nasmyth--A focus of the ESO 3.5 m New Technology Telescope in La Silla site (Chile). SOXS is composed of two high-efficiency spectrographs with a resolution slit product 4500, working in the visible (350 -- 850 nm) and NIR (800 -- 2000 nm) range respectively, and a light imager in the visible (the acquisition camera usable also for scientific purposes). The science case is very broad, it ranges from moving minor bodies in the solar system, to bursting young stellar objects, cataclysmic variables and X-ray binary transients in our Galaxy, supernovae and tidal disruption events in the local Universe, up to gamma-ray bursts in the very distant and young Universe, basically encompassing all distance scales and astronomy branches. At the moment, the instrument passed the Preliminary Design Review by ESO (July 2017) and the Final Design (with FDR in July 2018).