The milestone implies the technological completion of the Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory, in Teruel.

The Minister of Science of the Government of Aragon and President of the Board of CEFCA, María Eugenia Díaz, has visited the OAJ facilities.

After passing the verification tests, the cryogenic camera is being prepared to be delivered at CEFCA next August.

The OAJ already keeps the actuator system of JPCam in its clean room. After its arrival in mid January, the engineering team has carried out the integration of the system at the observatory in order to start with the verification and fine-tune processes, first in the clean room and, finally, in the JST250 telescope.

In late September, responsible members of CEFCA and the J-PAS collaboration visited e2v headquarters to see, first hand, the progress made on the set up of the cryogenic camera of JPCam, the scientific instrument designed by CEFCA and Brazil for the JST250 telescope.

With the successful achievement of this important milestone, e2v has demonstrated that the focal plane is well within the very strict JPCam requirements. The JPCam engineering focal plane has been successfully integrated at e2v (Chelmsford, UK). JPCam, the main scientific instrument of the JST250 telescope, is a 1.2 Gpixel camera designed to perform the J-PAS survey.

This week, the Institute of Astronomy , Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Sao Paulo and the Spanish company NTE-Sener signed the contract of the support structure and the actuator system of the JPCam.

In early December, and after an international process of peer review, Brazil’s Observatório Nacional, a partner institution in the Javalambre Physics of the Accelerated Universe Astrophysical Survey collaboration (J-PAS), and British company E2V signed a contract to provide the cryogenic camera system for the JST250 telescope of the Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre.