Front-End

ANDES will be mounted on one of the Nasmyth foci of the ESO Extremely Large Telescope in Chile.

To stabilize and inject the light coming from the telescope into the different spectrographs a Front-End will be installed on the Nasmyth platform.

The key functions of the Front-End are to support the different sub-units (arms) at the Nasmyth focus, to provide selection of the different observing modes, to allow sky subtraction during observations, and to manage fibre bundles and cables.

The Front-End comprises three different arms (two Seeing Limited Arms for object and sky subtraction, a Single Conjugate Adaptive Optics and an Integral Field Unit) and is connected to the spectrographs via a Fibre Link, that also provides the interfaces with the Calibration Unit.

As for the seeing limited arms, their key functions are to separate each spectrograph spectral band, provide atmospheric dispersion correction, guiding and field stabilization, and to allow calibration light injection.