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MICADO is the ELT first light instrument, an imager working at the diffraction limit of the telescope thanks to two adaptive optics (AO) modes: a single conjugate one (SCAO), available at the instrument first light and developed by the MICADO consortium, and a multi conjugate one (MCAO), developed by the MORFEO consortium. The MICADO project started the final design review process two years ago, in Feb. 2021, and has been through four successive review sessions since then, covering the different MICADO subsystems, including the SCAO module.
This final design review process should come to an end this year in 2023, allowing to enter officially into the manufacturing, assembly, integration and tests phase. Though, despite the decision of a delta FDR for few MICADO parts, the FDR board and ESO acknowledged after the FDR4 that ”the review of the final design can be considered complete for the majority of the MICADO sub-systems” (including the SCAO module) and agreed that MICADO can start manufacturing.
Manufacturing, integration and related tests have actually already started for several SCAO subsystems, in particular to validate the design of several parts by prototyping at ”full scale”. This strategy allows to optimize the project resources and to save time on the planning. It concerns its K-mirror (allowing to compensate for the pupil derotation), its ”WFS core” (i.e. the pyramid optical component, the WFS camera and the pupil imaging lenses that compensate for the axial pupil movements), its field selector, its modulation system, its real-time computer, its instrument control software, but also more basically its various motors.
This contribution presents the MAIT activities of those various components, starting from the critical ones, followed by the core ones and then all the other. This contribution finishes by presenting the next steps of the SCAO MAIT plan.
