Asgard/NOTT status update

Asgard/NOTT is coming together as the first L-band nulling interferometer for the VLTI — built to suppress starlight so we can see young giant planets near the snowline and hot dust close to nearby stars.

On the KU Leuven four-beam test bench, T. Mattheussen and colleagues have recorded the first spectrally dispersed ambient nulls through the Gallium Lanthanum Sulfide photonic chip. All four beams are now cophased, a revised acquisition and calibration pipeline is in place, and those measurements complement earlier broadband cryogenic chip tests. The cryogenic spectrograph and HAWAII-2RG detector are now being integrated in Leuven.

The cold nulling camera itself is already running in the cryostat. Peter Chingaipe reports cooldown of the cold optics near 100 K and the detector near 30 K, a vacuum of 8×10⁻⁸ mbar, and cryogenic validation of the filter wheel that will disperse the chip’s photometric, bright, and nulled outputs at 3.5–4.0 µm.

With Asgard Phase 1 already on sky, Marc-Antoine Martinod presents the integration status and the next steps that will bring the full suite — including NOTT — onto the VLTI for high-contrast observations from the Y band into the L band.

Read Asgard/NOTT: Status of laboratory nulling performance (SPIE 14148, July 2026), Status and performance of the Asgard/NOTT cold nulling camera (SPIE 14148, 1414827), and Pushing high angular resolution and high contrast observations on the VLTI from Y to L band with the Asgard instrumental suite: integration status and plans (SPIE 14148, 1414808).