AITC Update
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue33 1–31 October 2022
Annino Vaccarella, Brian Taylor and Tony Travouillion travelled to Potsdam, Germany to attend the 7th installment of the Scientific Detector Workshop, affectionately known as SDW. On this occasion the workshop was hosted by The Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP). SDW is held every three years or so, a small workshop with only 100 to 120 participants and very tightly focused on detectors and detector systems. The workshop format is to provide the participants plenty of opportunities to ask questions during the oral presentations and interactive roundtables for discussions. The daytime presentations are followed by evening informal gatherings and activities where the discussions and networking continue. There are no parallel sessions to ensure that all participants can engage in all the oral presentations.
ANU and the AITC were very well represented as we contributed 2 oral presentations and 4 posters between the three of us. Our first oral presentation, by Annino, during the first day of the workshop titled “ANU's detector systems roadmap vision for Australian astronomy and space applications.” The presentation outlined our goals and aspirations for the detector programme at the AITC and where we see ourselves contributing to the international detector community through our longer term strategic projects as well as a brief summary of the active projects we are delivering to customers such as MAVIS for the ESO VLT, GMTIFS for the GMT, Veloce for the AAT at SSO and DIRAC for the Eastern Anatolia Observatory in Turkey.
The long term strategic projects covered in the presentation included:
Rosella: a modular and reconfigurable detector controller for science-grade image sensors in space based missions.
ESO NGCII: an actively cooled chassis, electronics backplane for the new ESO NGCII detector controller currently under development at ESO.
Leonardo 1K: a three-side-buttable carrier to mount the detector along with the flex cable which integrates seamlessly with the ANU cryogenic preamplifiers.
During the presentation we also mentioned that we have a number of job vacancies including the section lead vacated by Jamie Gilbert, but in particular the gender equity positions. The gender equity positions were well received and we had a number of conversations during the course of the workshop with several early career female scientists and engineers interested in knowing more details. The advertised positions also instigated discussion more broadly among the participants regarding diversity and succession planning for the aging detector community and what can be done at future workshops to encourage more diverse participants.
The welcome reception was held at the end of the first day at the Große Refraktor or Great Refractor which has both 80cm and 50cm telescopes combined on a single mount. The Great Refractor is located on the grounds of the Telegrafenberg which is located in the Albert Einstein Science Park. We were treated to a historical lecture on the telescope and the people who built and used it. Seeing first light in August of 1899 it was discovered that the 80cm telescope did not provide the performance of the 50cm telescope. Professor Hartmann developed the Hartmann Mask, a tool that a lot of us are very familiar with, to identify the issue with the optics.
Unlike SPIE the poster session extends for the full duration of the workshop and is the focus of the morning and afternoon tea breaks. We presented four posters which provided more details for selected aspects of the oral presentation:
Conduction Cooled MTCA.4 Compliant Astronomical Detector Controller for CMOS Visible and Infra-Red Detectors and CCDs (Annino Vaccarella)
Design and Development of a Compact CMOS Detector Controller for Space Based Missions (Annino Vaccarella)
Design and manufacture of the carrier and flex cable for the Leonardo 1K (LmAPD) (Annino Vaccarella)
Multi-conjugate Adaptive-optics Visible Imager-Spectrograph (MAVIS): Adaptive Optics, Imager, and Spectrograph Detectors (Brian Taylor)
On the evening of the next to last night, the workshop dinner was held at the Museum Barberini, an art museum in central Potsdam. Some of us barely made it off the impressionist floor. The workshop dinner is a highlight of the week where awards, some very funny and some serious are awarded. We did well in this with Annino winning the “most dedicated attendee”. From the SOC viewpoint, this was an easy selection, no one else presented and had three posters at the meeting. Brian won the “Best Poster” award with his MAVIS detector poster. The best poster award was a representation of the JWST mirror as the award. Ian Baker from Leonardo won the best paper of the conference on the eAPD that has become the best new device for wavefront sensing and fringe tracking available these days and something that we here at ANU are heavily involved in. George and Marcia Rieke, PIs of MIRI and NIRCam, infrared instruments on JWST, respectively shared the best presentation award, the images they showed us from the instrument were amazing. For the fun awards, Kalaga Madhav won the Gert Finger Procrastinator award by turning in his paper the day the conference started (Gert almost won it again). Stephan Hollan won the Roger Smith Most Loquacious Award. Roger was on hand to congratulate the winner and good fun was had by all.
On the final day Tony presented his invited talk “Wide-Field, Infrared Astronomy from Antarctica,” a proposal to build an infra red observatory on the Antarctic high plateau.
Tony concluded his presentation by promoting the AITC’s bid to host SDW2025 in Sydney which was well received. We are facing stiff competition from La Silla in Chile, South Korea and California, but we are hopeful that our location near Asia and the natural beauty of our environment will help us make selection.
Annino Vaccarella and Brian Taylor
