Rapid Eye Mount telescope

Telescope

The telescope has been designed to be a fast pointing instrument, and its relatively small size is in fact balanced by a 10°/s accurate fast pointing. This velocity makes REM suitable for immediate response to random alerts.

The telescope hosts two instruments: REMIR, an infrared imaging camera, and ROSS, a visible imager and slitless spectrograph. The two cameras can observe simultaneously thanks to a dichroic placed before telescope focus the same field of view of 10×10 arc minutes. In the infrared range from 1 to 2.3 μm REMIR can use a (z′, J, H, K′) filter set. ROSS is equipped with a standard filter set (V, R, I) and an slitless Amici prism.

The observing procedure is completely robotic and the nightly schedule is optimized for the observation of scheduled targets but it is immediately overdriven by GRB (or other) alerts. Typically REM can observe the new target after 30 seconds from notification.

REM has been installed in its place during June 2003 and has been gathering data on GRB and other sources since then. Also it is a bench for experimental instrumentation and equipment.

In 2006 a wide-field camera parallel to the REM telescope, the TORTORA camera (Telescopio Ottimizzato per la Ricerca dei Transienti Ottici RApidi) was installed. TORTORA has a field of view of 24°x32° through an objective of 120 mm diameter. The instrument was optimized for photometry of fast transients with a best time resolution of about 0.1 s.

The observatory is operated for the Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica by the REM Team.