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MICADO will enable the ELT to perform diffraction limited near-infrared observations at first light. The instrument's capabilities focus on imaging (including astrometric and high contrast) as well as single object spectroscopy. This contribution looks at how requirements from the observing modes have driven the instrument design and functionality. Using examples from specific science cases, and making use of the data simulation tool, an outline is presented of what we can expect the instrument to achieve., Comment: Proc SPIE 10702. SPIE's copyright notice: "Copyright 2018 Society of PhotoOptical Instrumentation Engineers. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited."

4MOST is a wide-field, high-multiplex spectroscopic survey facility under development for the VISTA telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Its main science drivers are in the fields of galactic archeology, high-energy physics, galaxy evolution and cosmology. 4MOST will in particular provide the spectroscopic complements to the large area surveys coming from space missions like Gaia, eROSITA, Euclid, and PLATO and from ground-based facilities like VISTA, VST, DES, LSST and SKA. The 4MOST baseline concept features a 2.5 degree diameter field-of-view with similar to 2400 fibres in the focal surface that are configured by a fibre positioner based on the tilting spine principle. The fibres feed two types of spectrographs; similar to 1600 fibres go to two spectrographs with resolution R> 5000 (lambda similar to 390-930 nm) and similar to 800 fibres to a spectrograph with R> 18,000 (lambda similar to 392-437 nm & 515-572 nm & 605-675 nm). Both types of spectrographs are fixed-configuration, three-channel spectrographs. 4MOST will have an unique operations concept in which 5 year public surveys from both the consortium and the ESO community will be combined and observed in parallel during each exposure, resulting in more than 25 million spectra of targets spread over a large fraction of the southern sky. The 4MOST Facility Simulator (4FS) was developed to demonstrate the feasibility of this observing concept. 4MOST has been accepted for implementation by ESO with operations expected to start by the end of 2020. This paper provides a top-level overview of the 4MOST facility, while other papers in these proceedings provide more detailed descriptions of the instrument concept[1], the instrument requirements development[2], the systems engineering implementation[3], the instrument model[4], the fibre positioner concepts[5], the fibre feed[6], and the spectrographs[7].

The ESO Very Large Telescope Adaptive Optics Facility (VLT-AOF) will transform the VLT Unit Telescope 4 to an Adaptive Telescope. In absence of an intermediate focus before the Adaptive Secondary in this Ritchey–Chretien type telescope and in order to reduce the testing and calibration of the system on-sky, ASSIST, The Adaptive Secondary Setup and Instrument STimulator, was developed. It provides an off-sky testing facility for the ESO AOF and will provide a full testing environment for three elements of the VLT Adaptive Optics Facility: the Deformable Secondary Mirror (DSM) and the AO modules for MUSE and HAWK-I (GALACSI and GRAAL). ASSIST was delivered to ESO Garching, where it was assembled and tested. Currently ASSIST is being integrated with the Deformable Secondary Mirror, the first step in the full system testing of the two AO systems for the VLT AOF on ASSIST. This paper briefly reviews the design and properties of ASSIST and reports on the first results of ASSIST in stand-alone mode.

The 4MOST consortium is currently halfway through a Conceptual Design study for ESO with the aim to develop a wide-field (>3 square degree, goal >5 square degree), high-multiplex (>1500 fibres, goal 3000 fibres) spectroscopic survey facility for an ESO 4m-class telescope (VISTA). 4MOST will run permanently on the telescope to perform a 5 year public survey yielding more than 20 million spectra at resolution R~5000 (��=390-1000 nm) and more than 2 million spectra at R~20,000 (395-456.5 nm & 587-673 nm). The 4MOST design is especially intended to complement three key all-sky, space-based observatories of prime European interest: Gaia, eROSITA and Euclid. Initial design and performance estimates for the wide-field corrector concepts are presented. We consider two fibre positioner concepts, a well-known Phi-Theta system and a new R-Theta concept with a large patrol area. The spectrographs are fixed configuration two-arm spectrographs, with dedicated spectrographs for the high- and low-resolution. A full facility simulator is being developed to guide trade-off decisions regarding the optimal field-of-view, number of fibres needed, and the relative fraction of high-to-low resolution fibres. Mock catalogues with template spectra from seven Design Reference Surveys are simulated to verify the science requirements of 4MOST. The 4MOST consortium aims to deliver the full 4MOST facility by the end of 2018 and start delivering high-level data products for both consortium and ESO community targets a year later with yearly increments., To appear in the proceedings of the SPIE Astronomical Instrumentation + Telescopes conference, Amsterdam, 2012. 15 pages, 16 figures

ASSIST, The Adaptive Secondary Setup and Instrument STimulator, is being developed to provide a testing facility for the ESO Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF). It will allow the off-telescope testing of three elements of the VLT AOF; the Deformable Secondary Mirror (DSM) and the AO systems for MUSE and HAWK-I (GALACSI and GRAAL). The core of ASSIST consists of a 2-mirror setup (AM1-AM2) allowing the on-axis test of the DSM in interferometric mode. However, during the initial stages of ASSIST integration, DSM would not be present. This makes the task of aligning AM1-AM2 to within an accuracy of 0.05mm/1 arcmin rather challenging. A novel technique known as Shack-Hartmann method has been developed and tested in the lab for this purpose. A Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor will be used to measure the mis-alignment between AM1-AM2 by recording the coma and astigmatism in the presence of large spherical aberration introduced because of tilt/decenter of AM2 with respect to AM1. Thereafter, 20 optical components including lenses, flat mirrors and beam-splitter cubes divided into five sub-assemblies should be aligned to AM1-AM2- DSM axis which ultimately passes through the mechanical axis of large AMOS rotator.

The testing and verification of ESO Very Large Telescope Adaptive Optics Facility (VLT-AOF) requires new and innovative techniques to deal with the absence of an intermediate focus on the telescope. ASSIST, The Adaptive Secondary Setup and Instrument STimulator, was developed to provide a testing facility for the ESO AOF and will allow off-telescope testing of three elements of the VLT Adaptive Optics Facility; the Deformable Secondary Mirror (DSM) and the AO systems for MUSE and HAWK-I (GALACSI and GRAAL). ASSIST will provide a full testing environment which includes an interferometric testing mode for the DSM, an on-axis testing mode with a single wavefront sensor and full operation testing modes for both the AO systems. Both natural as well as laser guide stars will be simulated under various asterisms and a realistic turbulent atmosphere will be provided for varying atmospheric conditions. ASSIST passed its final design review and is now being manufactured, integrated and tested and will be operational in mid 2011, in time for first testing with the DSM.

The population of the 6 cm H2CO transition can be inverted by the radio continuum radiation of a nearby compact H II region. The H II region must be very compact with emission measures of 108 - 1010 cm-6 pc. Our model does explain the observed maser emission near NGC 7538 - IRS 1 if a large formaldehyde abundance ~ 8 x 10-7 is assumed.