GREST

The H2020 GREST (Getting Ready for EST) project aimed to take the European Solar Telescope to the next level of development by carrying out crucial activities to improve the performance of current state-of-the-art instrumentation. Legal, industrial and socio-economic issues were also addressed as key issues for the construction of EST.

The particular developments and strategic tasks accomplished during the GREST project were:

1. Boosting new generation detectors, with the development of two prototype sensors, one for large-format imaging and the other for high-precision polarimetry.
2. Evaluation of an existing large format wavefront sensing camera.
3. Development of a capacitance-stabilised Fabry-Perot prototype for high-quality control of the parallelism of the etalon plates;
4. New techniques for 2D solar spectropolarimetry with integral field units based on multi-slit image slicers or a microlens-fed spectrograph;
5. Development of large format liquid-crystal modulators, required by the new generation large aperture telescopes such as EST;
6. Evaluation of the performance of the EST MCAO deformable mirrors to improve the design and performance of this system;
7. Strategic work covering industrial, financial and legal issues related to the construction and operation of EST.