EVALSO
EVALSO is the abbreviation for Enabling virtual access to Latin-American southern observatories (German for example: enabling virtual access to southern observatories in Latin America ) an infrastructure project for better digital networking of locations of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Among other things, this should enable better remote access options and telepresence applications. The central measure is the replacement of the previous connection of the Chilean observatory sites on Cerro Paranal and Cerro Armazones with microwave radio links with a fiber optic cable over a hundred kilometers to Antofagasta . The four-kilometer-long sections were laid in a trench about one meter deep and connected in splice boxes to form the entire route.
The project was funded in part with money from the 7th Research Framework Program (FP7) of the European Commission . Work began in 2008 and the first transfer test was completed in October 2010. In particular, the data volume of the VISTA survey telescope , which exceeds that of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) many times over, exceeded the capacity of the previous connection and was transported on hard drives to the Garching near Munich location, which is over 11,000 kilometers away .