Description
Organisers: Carolyn Atkins, Cyril Bourgenot, David Lee, Matthias Tecza
This session invites contributions that present innovative concepts, emerging technologies, and new designs driving the future of astronomical instrumentation. From conceptual blueprints to unique prototypes and advanced systems, speakers will have the opportunity to present their latest ideas and developments, including those in early development, and to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with their realization.
The session aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and spark creative dialogue, covering a broad range of topics such as additive manufacturing, multi-object spectrographs, integral field units, adaptive optics, detector advancements, and novel telescope designs. Whether addressing ground or space-based instrumentation, we welcome fresh perspectives and ideas on instrumentation development that will define tomorrowโs observational astronomy.
A new generation of observatories dedicated to multi-object spectroscopy (MOS) are required to follow up on current and future all-sky imaging surveys. These facilities demand a step change in multiplex and efficiency compared to contemporary instrumentation, bringing profound engineering challenges. This paper will explore current technology development associated with the Wide-field...
Image slicers are becoming an increasingly dominant integral field unit (IFU) technology and will be a key component in a number of upcoming instruments for 20-40m class telescopes. They offer efficient use of the detector space, high throughput and simpler routes to coupling with high dispersion spectroscopy. For ESOโs upcoming Planetary Camera and Spectrograph (ELT-PCS) instrument, which...
Two-Photon Polymerisation is a form of additive manufacturing (3D printing) allowing the creation of structures on nano to macro scales. Its versatility means it has already found its way into a number of fields from life sciences to integrated photonics and microfluidics. Of particular interest to astronomy is the ability to โprintโ micro-optics.
Here I show some of the amazing structures...
We present an X-ray imager concept for the Jovian system. With the advancement of light-weight, novel lobster eye X-ray instrumentation, it is now possible to send an X-ray imaging telescope to the outer solar system, building on the heritage gained at the University of Leicester for such instrumentation (MIXS on BepiColombo, LEIA, WXT on EP, MXT on SVOM and SXI on SMILE). The Jovian system is...
Many modern astronomy instruments are now using superconducting detector technologies due to the advantageous properties of low-temperature superconducting materials. The very small superconducting bandgaps of some metals allows photon counting and energy resolving capabilities in wavebands spanning near/mid-infrared to X-ray, and time-integration measurements in the far-infrared,...
The South Pole Telescope Shirokoff Line Intensity Mapper (SPT-SLIM) experiment is a pathfinder for demonstrating the use of multipixel on-chip spectrometers for millimeter (mm) Line Intensity Mapping (LIM). SPT-SLIM targets the CO rotational transitions from galaxies with redshifts ranging $z\sim0.5$--$3$ to map the large-scale structure of the Universe through hyperspectral imaging. SPT-SLIM...
The vertical structure of atmospheric turbulence is one of the key environmental parameters affecting multi-conjugate adaptive optics system performance. Knowledge of the turbulence profile can be used throughout the lifecycle of an instrument, from optimising the AO system design, planning observing schedules and providing post-observation estimates of the instrument point-spread function....
In Astronomy and other large-scale physics experiments it is often required to create and maintain very low temperatures within a controlled environment. This means that various types of heat exchangers are used, one of which is evaporative coolers, where cooling is achieved via phase change of the coolant. The project aimed to produce a set of additively manufactured (AM) evaporative coolers...
The 6u Active Deployable Optical Telescope (A-DOT) is to feature an unfolding diffraction limited 36cm segmented primary aperture. It is an affordable, flexible and scalable design in development for several astronomy science cases, such as surveys, transient follow-up and solar system object fly-bys. Simulating a telescope before it is built presents significant challenges. A realistic model...
The integration of hardware accelerated machine learning is transforming astronomical instrumentation by enabling real-time video/image processing and adaptive optics for space-based applications. This project demonstrates the deployment of an Adaptive Optics segmented mirror co-phasing algorithms with applications for CubeSats on the AMD Versal AI Core, showcasing how FPGA-based architectures...
We present the design and development of the Liverpool InfraRed Imaging Camera (LIRIC) deployed on the 2.0m Liverpool Telescope on the Canary Island of La Palma. LIRIC employs a science grade sCMOS InGaAs detector with a usable imaging area of 607 x 510 pixels, providing a 3.0 x 2.5 arcmin field-of-view. The instrument includes an intergral Starlink Express filter wheel enabling the selection...
In the past decade the freeform optics technology has enabled new types of all-reflective imaging system designs with low F-number, wide field of view, and high image quality. However, in most of the cases, these imagers have the only pupil that coincides with one of the mirrors. In the meantime, in some cases in astronomical instrumentation, it would be desirable to have an additional...
With the advances in technologies, astronomers have discovered astronomical transients at increasingly faster time scales down to milliseconds - more specifically at radio wavelengths. Venturing into the unexplored territory of optical astronomy at nanoseconds time scales, we built the first nanosecond-resolved telescope SPINA. This ultra fast telescope utilised the short dead time and the...
The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) will be a 4-metre-class fully robotic telescope to be sited on La Palma. NRT will primarily be used in time-domain astrophysics, and, as such, there is a requirement for rapid response and high-efficiency observing and instrumentation. We have, therefore, developed a novel slit-based spectrograph design with no moving parts. The primary design feature is a...
Multi-Core Integral Field Unit (MCIFU) brings the advantages of the existing and expanding photonics field to the astronomical instrumentation, such as versatility of manufacturing and small footprint. The science case includes diffraction limited spectroscopy of close companions (~ 50 mas away from the host star) at a spectral resolving power (R) of 5000, in the Y, J and H band. MCIFU will be...
The Wide-field Spectroscopic Telescope (WST) is a proposed new large telescope dedicated to spectroscopic surveys and integral field spectroscopy. WST is being designed to meet the future need for large scale surveys for a variety of science cases including cosmology, extra-galactic, galactic, and time-domain science.
The WST concept is a 12 m aperture telescope with simultaneous operation...
