Maximizing the community exploitation of the VLTI 2nd-generation instruments

Abstract

The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI, Figure 1) is the European flagship interferometric facility and allows European astronomers to study the universe on milliarcsecond scale, enabling fundamentally new opportunities in planet formation to stellar and extragalactic astronomy. The facility was conceived with the goal of making optical interferometry available to the whole European astronomy community and to serve the needs both of expert as well as non-expert users. The VINCI commissioning instrument (Kervella et al. 2000), the 1st generation instruments MIDI (Leinert et al. 2003) and AMBER (Petrov et al. 2007) and the visitor instrument PIONIER (LeBouquin et al. 2011) took major steps towards this goal but revealed also challenges, for instance, related to attracting non-expert users to interferometry. Currently, the VLTI undergoes a major transformation with the arrival of the 2nd-generation instruments GRAVITY (GRAVITY collaboration et al. 2017) and MATISSE (Matter et al. 2016). GRAVITY has been offered to the community since October 2016, while the onsky commissioning of MATISSE is due to start in early 2018, with a possible start of regular science observations the following year. In this contribution, we reflect on how the 2ndgeneration instruments might help in expanding the VLTI user community and we will discuss steps that could be taken to support this process. The expert community, both inside and outside of the instrument consortia, should coordinate in order to optimize the scientific output of the new VLTI instruments.