The REM Telescope: a Robotic Facility to Promptly Follow-up GRBs and Cosmic Fast Transients

Abstract

The REM (Rapid Eye Mount) Telescope is a fully robotic fast‐slewing 60‐cm telescope. It has been primarily designed and realized to follow‐up the early phases of GRBs afterglow detected by space‐borne experiments such as SWIFT, HETE II, INTEGRAL, AGILE. Since June 2003, REM is operating in the La Silla Observatory (Chile). The Telescope is equipped with a high throughput Infrared Camera (REMIR) and an optical imaging spectrograph (ROSS) which are simultaneously fed by a dichroic. This allows to collect high S/N data in an unprecedented large spectral range (0.45 – 2.3 μm) on a telescope of this size. The wide band covered, the very fast pointing capability (60 degrees in 5 seconds) and the full robotization make REM the ideal experiment for observation of Gamma Ray Bursts and other fast transients. The REM observatory is an example of a versatile and agile facility necessary to complement large telescopes in fields in which rapid response and/or target pre‐screening are necessary. This paper describes the main characteristics and operation modes of the REM observatory and gives an overview of preliminary results obtained during the Science Verification Phase.