The Italian contribution to the Design Study of the EST European Solar Telescope: current status and future steps

The EST (European Solar Telescope) is a 4-m class telescope, four times larger than any existing high resolution solar telescope. It is designated with the highest prior- ity among the ground-based, medium term (2016-2020) new projects in the ASTRONET Roadmap (Panel C). The EST will be equipped with a suite of instruments to perform spectropolarimetric and imaging observations at high spatial and temporal resolution in the range UV-NIR. These instruments will measure fundamental astrophysical processes at their intrinsic scales in the Sun’s atmosphere to establish the mechanism of magnetic field generation and removal, and of energy transfer from the surface to the upper solar atmo- sphere and eventually to the whole heliosphere. The conceptual design study, which has been funded from EU in the framework of FP7, started on February 2008. In this paper we summarize the Italian participation to the EST project, which includes detailed design of various subsystems affecting the opto-mechanical structure, the suite of post-focus instru- ments, the data handling, and the control system.