ELT-HIRES, the high resolution spectrograph for the ELT: results from the Phase A study

We present the results from the phase A study of ELT-HIRES, an optical-infrared High Resolution Spectrograph for ELT, which has just been completed by a consortium of 30 institutes from 12 countries forming a team of about 200 scientists and engineers. The top science cases of ELT-HIRES will be the detection of life signatures from exoplanet atmospheres, tests on the stability of Nature's fundamental couplings, the direct detection of the cosmic acceleration. However, the science requirements of these science cases enable many other groundbreaking science cases. The baseline design, which allows to fulfil the top science cases, consists in a modular fiber- fed cross-dispersed echelle spectrograph with two ultra-stable spectral arms providing a simultaneous spectral range of 0.4-1.8 ¿m at a spectral resolution of 100,000. The fiber-feeding allows ELT-HIRES to have several, interchangeable observing modes including a SCAO module and a small diffraction-limited IFU.© 2018 SPIE.
The Italian contribution to this project is supported by a specific grant provided by INAF, the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics. The Portuguese team was supported by Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT, Portugal) through the research grant through national funds and by FEDER through COMPETE2020 by grants UID/FIS/04434/2013 & POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007672 and PTDC/FIS-AST/1526/2014 & POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016886. N.C.S. also acknowledges support from FCT through Investigador FCT contract IF/00169/2012/CP0150/CT0002. CAP, MA, AF, JIGH, JLR, RR, and FT acknowledge the Spanish ministry project MINECO AYA2014-56359-P. JIGH also acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under the 2013 Ramon y Cajal program MINECO RYC-2013-14875.