On the Way to an E-ELT Instrumentation Plan

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) project is very much based on the heritage of the ESO Very Large Telescope, the array of four 8 m optical telescopes located on the Paranal peak in the Atacama desert. The VLT started operation in 1998 and with its complement of 11 instruments permanently on line has proved to be the most powerful facility for ground-based astronomy at optical and infrared wavelengths (see the contribution by A. Moorwood in these Proceedings). In the case of the VLT, an Instrumentation Plan Proposal was distributed to the community as early as 1989 and this approach, with corrections and upgrades introduced on the way, has been very effective in developing a coherent set of instruments in collaboration between ESO, Universities and Institutes in the ESO member countries. In the case of the E-ELT, ESO is now coordinating a series of instrument studies with the goal to define a first generation of instruments to be included in the proposal for construction due at the beginning of 2010.