Seeded by in-house instrumentation developments and the operation of the KOSMA-3m telescope on the Gornergrat in Switzerland followed by NANTEN2 (together with Nagoya, Japan) in Chile, the UoC has successfully deployed the HIFI instrument on the Herschel Space Observatory HIFI10 and the SOFIA/GREAT THz multi-beam spectrometer in the stratosphere GREAT12. GREAT, in particular, has led to the majority of the scientific publications from the SOFIA airplane-mounted telescope among all its instruments over the entire mission.
These previous works have now progressed into the development of the innovative CCAT/FYST (sub-)mm survey telescope with first light set for late 2025 (Parshley et al., 2018).
In support of CCAT/FYST instrumentation, the group of Prof. Dominik Riechers has received a DFG Large-scale instrumentation grant to build the high-frequency channel of the CHAI hetreodyne spectrometer, which is key to carry out the core observational program GeCO, which is led by the UoC.
