GENIE is the Ground based European Nulling Interferometry Experiment. To be built by ESA as technology demonstrator for DARWIN and to become a full facility instrument for ESO's VLTI. The current preliminary design of GENIE concentrates on a two-way beam combiner operating in the (near-) infrared (K, L, or N band). The science objective of GENIE is to observe a couple of hundred candidate stars for DARWIN in order to measure the zodiacal light and bright orbiting extra-solar planets. Kick-off for GENIE was in June 2002, and the instrument is scheduled for commissioning in 2006. GENIE will be built by industry with support of academia.
A workshop on GENIE has been organized in June 2002 at Leiden by ESA, ESO, and NOVA/NEVEC. Details on the workshop can be found here.
We provide results of the readings of the four temperature/humidity HMT 323/HMP 303 sensors installed in the VLTI laboratory on Paranal in Sep 2004 within the GENIE T/RH sensor project as PostScript and raw ASCII files.
Details have been moved to R Mathar's VLTI pages.