WST challenges

Environmental

With several 10-meter-class telescopes planned over the next 20 years, WST will pave the way for a new generation of ground-based telescopes in minimising the impact on close environment and greenhouse gas emission. To meet this challenge estimate of the CO2 impact will be used as one of the trade-off parameters during the concept study

SOCIAL

WST will commit to supporting a path of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)  during the hiring process and the long term development of the project,  providing an opportunity to keep enhancing the respect of EDI in the future and to consider new approaches to improve the participation of any kind of minority. 

data management

WST data and software tools will follow the Open Science paradigm: As with all ESO public surveys, we expect that WST raw data will become public as soon as they are acquired, while reduced spectra will become public at the latest one year after acquisition.

COst

The construction cost envelope is expected to be around 800 M€. Cost and associated risk is a major item to be refined during the concept study.

Funding/Schedule

Building a new telescope can be a long-drawn-out exercise. To minimise the risk of losing our lead on the competition, we will evaluate the long-lead items and overall schedule to first light. We will thus be able to provide a mitigation plan via a scenario for early science operations using the full telescope but only a fraction of the spectrographs.

© WST telescope