Work Package 1: the entire chain of data processing has been improved. Concerning WP1.1 the public archives queries are now automatized, thanks to the work of the PhD student (N. Miret Roig) with the help of an undergraduate trainee, making it very easy for any team member to access the wealth of data available in the most important astronomical archives. Concerning WP1.2 telescope time requests have been submitted every semester to the best facilities worldwide (ESO, Subaru, La Palma, Calar Alto, NOAO, HST, OHP), and our approval rate has been close to 80%, ensuring that we had plenty of very high quality data to achieve our objectives. The junior team members (PhD and Postdocs) have been trained by the P.I. to prepare and lead the observations at the telescope, and are now experienced astronomers. Concerning WP1.3 we could not hire an engineer to do the update of our image processing software due to the lack of qualified candidates. Fortunately a PhD student co-funded by the university of Bordeaux and the CNES joined the team to develop image processing modules based on artificial intelligence. Combined with the software used by the P.I. it improves significantly the final data quality and so we were able to go on with the data processing. A powerful computing facility has been acquired as planned early in the project to be able to process the large quantity of data in a most efficient way. This facility is absolutely essential and allows our team to achieve our goals in a timely manner. The original hardware design was slightly modified with the addition of GPU cards, which proved absolutely revolutionary and decreased some parts of the calculations by a factor of 50 to 100, but also allowed to use newly developed software based on deep learning methods to perform the data processing.
Work Package 2: The upgrade of the astrometric software included in WP2.1 could not be done, but did not compromise our ability to analyse the data. WP2.3 has led to the design by one of our external collaborator of a novel data processing method to correct the atmospheric turbulence to produce high-spatial resolution images using modern CMOS cameras. WP2.4 has been fully implemented and improved performances (speed) by as much as 30% to 40% in the case of very large dataset. WP2.5 has been implemented as soon as the Gaia DR2 was released, and leads to significant improvements in the quality of the astrometric solution, with residuals dropping by half in the final solution.
Work Package 3: Concerning WP3.1 the first version of a hierarchical model has been fully tested and published in Olivares et al. (2018). The performances were excellent and the results impressive. Concerning WP3.2 the ultimate parallelization has been achieved using GPU cards, with spectacular speed improvements absolutely crucial for the rest of the development. WP3.3 is complete: an external module (called Kalkayotl) has been developed to analyse the spatial distribution. The treatment of binarity in WP3.4 has been completed and is integrated in the hierarchical model. Concerning WP3.5 the treatment of extinction is now fully implemented and functional with already very interesting and exciting results in a number of embedded young star forming regions. Finally, concerning WP3.7 we have been taking advantage of the Gaia DR2 release to compare our results and cross-validate the methods. This allowed us to confirm that our strategy is well defined and performs as expected, and also allowed us to tune and optimize some parameters of the hierarchical model.
Work Package 4: The work planned for WP4 depends directly on the results obtained and delivered by the WP 1 to 3. We have successfully conducted WP4.4 and WP4.3 by gathering spectroscopic data at various world class facilities (OHP, GTC, HST, La Silla) to study the atmosphere of ultracool objects, search for planetary mass companions and measure radial velocities. Part of these have been published and more publication will come in the future as the data are acquired and analysed.
Work Package 5: The team members participated to various outreach events, from seminars for the general public or undergraduate students to podcats, live-streaming, publications in magazines as well as high-school student visits and visit to primary schools.
