The New Robotic Telescope: progress report

Abstract

The robotic 2-metre Liverpool Telescope (LT), located at Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, has seen great success in its <15 year lifetime. In particular the facility thrives in time domain astronomy, responding rapidly to triggers from Swift and efficiently conducting a wide variety of science with its intelligent scheduler. The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) will be a 4-metre class, rapid response, autonomous telescope joining the Liverpool Telescope on La Palma in ~2025. The NRT will slew to targets and start observations within 30 seconds of receipt of a trigger, allowing us to observe faint and rapidly fading transient sources that no other optical facility can capture. The NRT will be the world’s largest optical robotic telescope. Its novel, first-generation instrumentation suite will be designed to conduct spectroscopic, polarimetric and photometric observations driven by user requirements.