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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, November 19, 2007 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

photo of speaker

Colin Cunningham

"Technology Challenges of Future Ground and Space Based Telescopes"

ABSTRACT -- As we move towards the launch of the biggest space telescope ever, the Herschel Space Observatory, to be followed by the James Webb Space Telescope, we are also planning the next generation of giant ground based telescopes. I will give my view of the major technology and engineering breakthroughs which have led to the highly productive range of telescopes for optical and infrared astronomy we have today. I will then describe projects for extremely large telescopes of up to 42 meters diameter on the ground, and how their development might impact plans for future space telescopes. Finally, I will speculate on what revolutionary technologies could come along to change the way we build the ground and space-based telescopes of the more distant future.

SPEAKER -- Colin Cunningham is director of the UK Extremely Large Telescopes (ELT) Programme at the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ETC) at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has over thirty years experience in electronic and systems engineering, project management and technology management for a range of scientific applications including biology, geophysics and astronomy. His primary responsibility is to lead the UK’s efforts towards a European Extremely Large Telescopes and its associated instruments and systems. He chairs the European Framework 6 Opticon Key Technologies Network, is Principal Investigator of the Opticon Smart Focal Planes Project, PI of the UK ELT R&D Programme, and chairs the European Southern Observatory ELT Instrumentation Working Group. He is a member of the management teams for the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance 'Technology for Experimental and Observational Physics' programme, and the Edinburgh Research Partnership’s 'Institute for Integrated Systems'. He also leads the UK ATC’s knowledge exchange and innovation activities. He is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the IET, Member of the IoP and SPIE, and is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow University, and Honorary Professor at Heriot Watt and Edinburgh Universities. He is married with two grown up (sort of) children, and outside of work he is a keen cyclist, motorcyclist, birdwatcher, and photographer.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsf c.nasa.gov