Abstract

CARMENES, the new Calar Alto spectrograph especially built for radial-velocity surveys of exoearths around M dwarfs, is a very complicated system. For reaching the goal of 1 m/s radial-velocity accuracy, it is appropriate not only to monitor stars with the best observing procedure, but to monitor also the parameters of the CARMENES subsystems and safely store all the engineer and science data. Here we describe the CARMENES data flow from the different subsystems, through the instrument control system and pipeline, to the virtual-observatory data server and astronomers.