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.

This project aims to push laser tracking of space debris to a new level by using an ultra-fast Adaptive Optics system and a Laser Guide Star.

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

This high-performance AO system is designed to overcome atmospheric turbulence which otherwise distorts images captured by a ground-based telescope.

The Gemini High Resolution Optical SpecTrograph (GHOST) will be a new instrument from 2019 for the 8m Gemini South telescope in Chile.

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.

The Gemini High Resolution Optical SpecTrograph (GHOST) will be a new instrument from 2019 for the 8m Gemini South telescope in Chile.

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.

Fyris Alpha is a high resolution, shock capturing, multi-phase, up-wind Godunov method hydrodynamics code, which includes a variable equation of state, and optional microphysics such as cooling, gravity and mutlitple tracer variables. 

NIFS is a near-infrared integral-field spectrometer that was designed and built by the RSAA for the 8m Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.

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.