Behind the Webb January 1, 2010
Posted by sarah in: new astronomy . Add a commentFirst of all – best wishes for the new year to you all!
Working on an instrument for James Webb Space Telescope I regularly receive emails from NASA when the telescope features in the media or new images are released. Recently I discovered that there’s a new site for JWST called webbtelescope.org – in the style of hubblesite.org – and it contains a couple of episodes of a relatively new video podcast series called Behind the Webb. The first episode was about the detectors for MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument whose testing and calibration I work on. As the components that actually transform the incoming photons from the teelscope into a digital signal that we can see, record, process and interpret, the detectors are the heart of the instrument – and this episode is a nice intro to how it all works. Watch it below via YouTube or go to the original page (whose embed code doesn’t seem to work).
Future facilities: Coming quite close now actually November 22, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, me, science . Add a commentThis week saw several major developments in my work on instrumentation for astronomy, and as I got lots of Twitter response, I thought I would talk a bit more about them here.
The benefit of hindsight February 26, 2009
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Left: The image of the HR8799 planetary system from data taken with the Keck telescope. Right: the 1998 Hubble data (credit: NRC) (a) original Hubble image, (b) with "traditional" speckle subtraction method, (c-d) 2 images reprocessed showing the planet above the noise (credit: Lafrenière et al., 2009).
An interesting paper turned up on astro-ph last week. Remember HR8799, the star with a whole family of exoplanets imaged directly last year? A Canadian-American team of scientists went back through the archive and re-analysed data taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1998. And lo and behold, using new analysis techniques they managed to tease the outermost of HR8799’s planets out of the noise. Very cool. After all, 1998 was only three years after the first ever detection of an exoplanet! Obtaining a direct image of one really was just a glint in our starry eyes back then.
Today I'm in….. January 19, 2009
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The MIRI engineering model, ready for testing
Today, and for the rest of this week, I’m in the city of Leuven, Belgium. Together with some colleagues from the Catholic University of Leuven and various other institutes in Europe I’m spending a few days working on some aspects of calibration and testing for MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope. The JWST, although offcially its “successor”, will differ from Hubble in that it will be optimised for observations in the infrared, rather than the optical or ultraviolet. Although great science can be done at the shorter wavelengths, achieving top notch image quality is more demanding at shorter wavelengths – with the costs for JWST far exceeding initial estimates as it is, who knows what the budget would have had to be for an optical JWST?
Hubble: Servicing Mission 4 postponed September 30, 2008
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Astronaut Steve Smith works on Hubble during Servicing Mission 2 in 1997.
Astronomers around the world are quite concerned today following NASA’s announcement yesterday of a serious problem with the Hubble Space Telescope that has forced them to delay the all-important 4th servicing mission to next year. The fault, which occurred last weekend in the telescope’s command and data handling system, is preventing data from being sent down from the telescope. The telescope itself, they stressed, is absolutely fine – but this is a pretty serious fault nonetheless.
