MARCOT: A new approach to a large aperture telescope with a novel multimode photonic lantern

In the past half-century, a new generation of successively ever larger and more sophisticated telescopes and instruments have ushered in a golden age of remarkable results in astronomy. This road is taking us to the age of the extremely large telescopes (ELTs). Riding on this wave and contributing to it is exoplanet research. We are characterising the orbit and mass of exoplanets with Doppler measurements which, combined with the transit technique provide estimates of bulk densities and compositions. The picture is completed with upcoming space missions such as ARIEL or PLATO. To prepare the road into this new era, we propose to build the MultiArray of Combined Telescope (MARCOT). This large aperture telescope consists of multiple identical low-cost telescopes, at a fraction of the cost of building an ELT. We propose MARCOT to support science cases, such as time-domain astronomy in general and exoplanet research in particular, that are too expensive or impractical to conduct on ELTs. MARCOT will be linked through optical fibres combined by a novel Multi-Mode Photonic Lantern (MM-PL) into a MM fibre that will feed a single high-resolution echelle spectrograph, optimized for extreme-precision radial velocity measurements. We will present the status of the project focusing on the work carried out towards the conceptual design and the prototype of MARCOT, which is being built at the CAHA Observatory (Almeria, Spain), to feed the CARMENES spectrograph.