Research

Research Projects

  • Adaptive carbon-fibre mirrors for extremely large telescopes
    • R&D into large, thin and lightweight deformable mirrors made from carbon-fibre composite materials and suitable for visible to near infrared applications.

  • LATT - Large Aperture Telescope Technologies
    • A European Space Agency funded design study into deployable space telescopes for LIDAR missions.

  • SXO - Smart X-ray Optics
    • Active optics applied to thin-shell, grazing incident, x-ray telescopes to improve mid-scale form deformations. Applicable for future generation x-ray observatories.

  • OSCA, a coronagraph for the WHT
    • Development and commissioning of a near-IR (Z to K band) coronagraph for the NAOMI adaptive optics system at the William Herschel Telescope (La Palma, Canary Islands).

    Astronomy interests

    Areas of interest are circumstellar environments leading to planetary formation and the detection and characterisation of extra-solar planets.

    Apart from the obvious fascination of worlds beyond our own solar system and questions of other life and habitability elsewhere in the universe, my interest in this topic is also closely linked with the technical challenges associated with such discoveries. As an example, to image an earth-like planet in visible light requires contrast ratios of 1 in a billion and at infra-red wavelengths this drops to 1 in a million.  In addition high resolution is needed (e.g. 1 AU @ 10 parsecs gives an angular separation of 0.1 arcsec), requiring a diffraction limited telescope with a primary aperture diameter of at least 1.5 metres in visible wavelengths and increasing for longer wavelengths.

    [Home] [Research] [PhD research] [Smart X-ray Optics] [CFRP Mirrors] [LATT] [CV] [Publications] [Useful Links] [UCL Astrophysics]