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.

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.

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.

This project aims to demonstrate the advantages of LGS-AO for deep space optical communications.

This project aims to utilize LLMs (Large Language Models) to enhance the usability of systems engineering documentation, including system requirement documents and flowdowns, interface documents, design documents, and reliability assessments.

A student undertaking this project will investigate the potential customisations of lenslet arrays afforded by optical meta-surfaces, and propose designs to be fabricated in the Research School of Physics at ANU.

The successful applicant will work on one of several software related projects for the DREAMS infrared surveyor

This project aims to research and potentially develop the design of calibration light sources for use in the MAVIS instrument (currently being designed for the ESO VLT).

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) requires real-time phasing of its primary mirror segments. Each instrument of GMT is required to provide phasing telemetry from guide-star images.

TAROS is a remote observing software system that has been designed and implemented at RSAA. The system allows the ANU telescopes at a remote location to be operated automatically, or interactively with authenticated control via the internet.

In order to further the MAVIS design, an image simulator was built in Python, allowing star catalogs to be fed in, which are used to generate realistic MAVIS images. MAVIS now requires an IFU simulator to be developed, providing realistic IFU images from star catalogs.

To optimally build and operate adaptive optics systems, we need to understand the typical atmospheric conditions on the site where the telescope is built. Therefore, the Advanced Instrumentation and Technology Centre (AITC) is conducting a site characterisation campaign at Mount Stromlo.

SkyMapper is a state-of-the-art automated wide-field survey telescope located at Siding Spring Observatory. Its mission is to robotically create the first comprehensive digital survey of the entire southern sky, providing a massively detailed record of over a billion stars and galaxies, to a depth one million times fainter than the human eye can observe. 

Veloce Rosso will be Australia’s next premier astronomical instrument.