Instrumentation and Surveys

untitled.007.jpeg

The IoA is involved in instrumentation and surveys in the optical and infrared. Current instrumentation projects include Super-sharp which is the development of unfolding space telescopes and Lucky Imaging which uses high speed CCDs to remove effects of the atmosphere. The IoA also has a leading role in the Planck and GAIA ESA space missions.

Cambridge Astronomy Survey Unit

CASU is involved in survey astronomy with expertise covering ground- and space-based projects ranging from data processing and image analysis techniques through to data curation and access to UK facility data archives.

Gaia: a Stereoscopic Census of our Galaxy

Gaia is the ESA cornerstone mission set to revolutionise our understanding of the Milky Way. It is designed to map over one billion stars with three instruments to collect astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data on stars in the Milky Way and in galaxies belonging to the Local Group, distant galaxies, quasars and solar system objects.

The IoA has a lead role developing significant elements of the data processing and analysis systems required by Gaia. The IoA is also the lead group developing the Gaia Science Alerts pipeline. Gaia Science Alerts are publishing new transient sources discovered on a daily basis. 

PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars)

The PLATO space mission will detect and characterise terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zone of solar-type stars. The IoA is responsible for the development and operation of the PLATO Exoplanet Analysis System. 

Super-Sharp

We are developing telescopes that can be folded up inside a rocket for the ride into space and then unfold once in orbit. This is because we want a small launch package to reduce costs and a large powerful telescope to study the Earth or the Cosmos.

We are currently working on a 60cm aperture thermal infra-red telescope which fits in to a 12U CubeSat. An important application of this is to monitor the energy usage of almost all of the buildings on Earth to identify where mitigating action should be taken. This can have a big impact because the control of the interior temperature of buildings contributes about 29% of global CO2 emissions.

Lucky Imaging, Adaptive Optics, Quanta Detectors

We have been developing a range of new techniques to improve the image quality and sensitivity of astronomical detectors in the visible and near infrared. More details may be found in the attached sections indexed through the webpages linked under Professor Craig Mackay's page. These include details of how the ideas of lucky imaging combined with those of very low noise photon-counting imaging systems have been used successfully, leading to a number of important science papers. These pages include new developments in combining these methods with a novel approach to wavefront detection for adaptive optics applications. Most recently we have been looking at the way that even greater sensitivity may be achieved using Quanta detectors.

A list of the most recent papers published by this group can be found indexed on that webpage.