From ESPRESSO to the future -- Analysis of QSO spectra with the Astrocook package

Abstract: The ESPRESSO instrument, to be commissioned in the next months at the ESO VLT, is bound to became a landmark in the field of high-resolution optical spectroscopy, both for its ground-breaking science objectives (search for Earth-like exoplanets; measure of a possible variation of fundamental constants) and for its novel approach to data treatment. For the first time for an ESO instrument, scientific information will be extracted in real time by a dedicated Data Analysis Software (DAS), which includes several interactive workflows to handle the typical analysis cases in stellar and QSO spectroscopy. Data analysis tools in the oncoming ELT era will face very demanding requirements from compelling science case, such as the Sandage Test: the need of handling larger data sizes with a higher degree of accuracy, and the possibility to compare observations and simulated data on the fly. To this purpose, we are currently porting the solutions developed for ESPRESSO to a wider framework, integrating the algorithms within a full-fledged set of Python modules. The project, named "Astrocook", is aimed to provide a set of high-level, instrument-agnostic procedures to automatically extract physical information from the data.