New Optical Ground Station of the European Space Agency (ESA) at the Observatorio del Teide in Tenerife

The Astronomical Instruments Group of Carl Zeiss Jena has supplied 13 RCC telescopes with Im aperture within the last 35 years. The last one of this series was procured by DARA together with a 12.5m observatory dome from Zeiss to be used at the new Optical Ground Station of ESA in Tenerife in 1991. The fully computer controlled astronomical telescope, however, will be utilised due to its versatile design for a rather diversified range of unique applications, such as Optical communication via modulated laser beams to satellites and check-out of Space Debris. It has been equipped with a number of additional instrumentation, such as a 4kx4k pixel CCD camera cooled with liquid nitrogen and a focal plane optical bench with highly sophisticated transmit and receive optics and high power lasers.