Optical instrumentation prototyping could be made significantly faster and cheaper with the availability of on-demand, customisable opto-mechanical components.

In this project the student will investigate the feasibility of a 3D printed deformable mirror with an embedded water-cooling system, and its expected performance under extreme heat conditions based on the selected material and actuator configuration.

The successful applicant will join the ANU team and will assist with the development of instrumentation for the optical communication team

A student undertaking this project will review the existing methods, and assess their suitability in MAVIS, including implementation and testing of a method to actively cancel telescope vibrations with the adaptive optics control loop.

The AITC requires a generalised adaptive optics (AO) test bench in order to test experimental and research AO designs and technologies, as well as to verify AO instrumentation. The test bench will be built using in house optical components and be driven by software written in Python.

The project is supported by the federal government's Australian Space Research Program (ASRP) and will use small-satellite technology provide a new communications infrastructure.

The Australian Plasma Thruster (APT) will help deep-space probes travel for longer and further into space and be used to de-orbit satellites at the end of their lifetimes. The engine of the thruster will be based on ANU Professor Christine Charles's Helicon Double Layer Thruster (HDLT), which is the first of its kind in the world.

Containerised applications can improve modularity when interfacing hardware from different vendors across a variety of machines.

The aim of this research is to determine the correlation of the tip-tilt to confirm that the downlink can be used as a reliable reference source for adaptive optics applied to the uplink signal.

This project aims to conceptualize a UV astronomical space mission to explore the interstellar medium (ISM) in the Milky Way and nearby Local Group Galaxies. Utilizing recent UV coating and detector advancements, the proposed mission involves high-throughput, compact UV spectroscopic instruments.

Even from our telescopes on the tops of high mountains, the Earth’s atmosphere blurs observations reducing their clarity.

The Gemini South Adaptive Optics Imager - known as GSAOI - is a $6.3 million, wide-field, infrared camera that was designed and manufactured by RSAA engineers and technicians for the Gemini South telescope in Chile.

GMTIFS is a near-infrared imager and integral-field spectrograph.

We are building a powerful new instrument to work with the Giant Magellan Telescope to record images and spectra ten times sharper than possible with the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Australian company ViPAC Engineers & Scientists Pty. Ltd. is leading a project to develop a space-based monitoring system to improve the measurement of greenhouse gases, funded by under the government's Australian Space Research Program (ASRP).

The ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA) is collaborating with the National Astronomical Observatory Japan to develop a next-generation Ground Layer Adaptive Optics (GLAO) system for installation on the 8-meter optical-infrared Subaru telescope at the summit of Maunakea, Hawaii.

Are you ready to blend academic and commercial experience? Can you dive into details and also see the bigger picture? Are you interested in seeing how your knowledge can be applied to real-world outcomes? If so, we’d love to hear from you.

Do you enjoy working with instrumentation? Are you interested in using data to inform real-world decisions? Are you an independent thinker who loves to solve problems? If so, we’d love to hear from you.

CSIRO has a cold spray research group which is developing cold sprayed Invar. This project will be developing an optical metrology setup to measure the creep of the cold sprayed Invar in collaboration with CSIRO Lab22 in Clayton, Victoria.

This project aims to address the potential of Spatial Light Modulators (SLMs) as highly nonlinear optical elements, including their potential use in pyramid wavefront sensing.