Starbugs: all-singing, all-dancing fibre positioning robots

Gilbert, James; Goodwin, Michael; Heijmans, Jeroen; Müller, Rolf; Miziarski, Stan; Brzeski, Jurek; Waller, Lew; Saunders, Will; Bennet, Alex; Tims, Julia

doi:10.1117/12.924502

Cited by 22 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…By stacking the AWGs and feeding light from different sections of an extended source to separate AWGs, a compact integral field unit (IFU) spectrograph can be constructed. Such a stack can also be combined with automated fiber positioners (e.g., starbugs [73]) to make rapidly reconfigurable multi-object spectrographs.…”

Section: Challenges and The Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

Astrophotonic Spectrographs

2019

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Astrophotonics is the application of photonic technologies to channel, manipulate, and disperse light from one or more telescopes to achieve scientific objectives in astronomy in an efficient and cost-effective way. Utilizing photonic advantage for astronomical spectroscopy is a promising approach to miniaturizing the next generation of spectrometers for large telescopes. It can be primarily attained by leveraging the two-dimensional nature of photonic structures on a chip or a set of fibers, thus reducing the size of spectroscopic instrumentation to a few centimeters and the weight to a few hundred grams. A wide variety of astrophotonic spectrometers is currently being developed, including arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs), photonic echelle gratings (PEGs), and Fourier-transform spectrometer (FTS). These astrophotonic devices are flexible, cheaper to mass produce, easier to control, and much less susceptible to vibrations and flexure than conventional astronomical spectrographs. The applications of these spectrographs range from astronomy to biomedical analysis. This paper provides a brief review of this new class of astronomical spectrographs.Appl. Sci. 2019, xx, 5 2 of 18 of the telescope), creating new challenges for instrumentation [7]. At the same time, there is an explosion in the number of large astronomical surveys discovering a multitude of new transients, exoplanets, and galaxies. This necessitates development of new instruments for large telescopes that are compact and cost-effective while providing the flexibility to address the challenge of high-throughput characterization for these large surveys.Photonic technologies provide a promising platform for building next-generation instruments that are flexible (in terms of light manipulation), compact (volumes of a few tens of cubic centimetres) and lightweight (a few hundreds of grams), thanks to manipulation of guided light [8,9]. In addition, they are cost-effective, due to the advantages of mass-fabrication. Therefore, the astronomical community has pursued this direction very positively and built a wide variety of instruments from the near-ultraviolet (NUV) [10] to mid-infrared (MIR) wavebands [11]. As an example of the growth of astrophotonics, Figure 1 shows the number of citations of papers related to astrophotonic spectrographs. However, the current technical know-how is still far from complete or ideal, leaving many challenges that will likely be addressed in the near future.In this paper, we focus on the recent developments in the field of astrophotonic spectrographs. To paint a complete picture, in Sections 2 and 3, respectively, we briefly discuss the steps to channel the light from the telescope to the spectrograph and condition it. Photonic dispersion concepts, and their implementation and challenges are described in Section 4. In Section 5, we discuss new developments in calibration and detection that are particularly of interest to astrophotonic spectrographs. Lastly, in Section 6, we summarize and discuss the impact of photonic spectrogr...

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Section: Challenges and The Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

Astrophotonic Spectrographs

2019

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“…The light-weight and flexible nature of the polymer imaging bundles makes them suited to many types of fibre positioning technologies. In addition to use in plugplate instruments, the 1.5 mm polymer imaging bundle has also been proven to be compatible with the Star-Bugs positioning system (Gilbert et al 2012;Kuehn et al 2014), and multiple 0.5 mm polymer imaging bundles will perform the guiding for the multi-object fibre spectrograph instrument, TAIPAN on the UK Schmidt Telescope (Kuehn et al 2014, see Figure 7). Even though there is a loss in efficiency when using the 0.5 mm polymer imaging bundle instead of the 1.5 mm polymer imaging bundle, the smaller core sizes of the 0.5 mm polymer imaging bundle are better suited to the plate scale of the UKST (0.44 to 1.08 arcsec per core respectively, with the latter being too coarse to accurately sample the guide star's point-spread-function).…”

Section: Field Acquisition and Guidingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performance of a Novel PMMA Polymer Imaging Bundle for Field Acquisition and Wavefront Sensing

Richards¹,

Leon-Saval²,

Goodwin³

et al. 2017

Publ. Astron. Soc. Aust.

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Imaging bundles provide a convenient way to translate a spatially coherent image, yet conventional imaging bundles made from silica fibre optics typically remain expensive with large losses due to poor filling factors (∼ 40%). We present the characterisation of a novel polymer imaging bundle made from poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) that is considerably cheaper and a better alternative to silica imaging bundles over short distances (∼ 1 m; from the middle to the edge of a telescope's focal plane). The large increase in filling factor (92% for the polymer imaging bundle) outweighs the large increase in optical attenuation from using PMMA (1 dB/m) instead of silica (10 −3 dB/m). We present and discuss current and possible future multiobject applications of the polymer imaging bundle in the context of astronomical instrumentation including: field acquisition, guiding, wavefront sensing, narrow-band imaging, aperture masking, and speckle imaging. The use of PMMA limits its use in low light applications (e.g. imaging of galaxies), however it is possible to fabricate polymer imaging bundles from a range of polymers that are better suited to the desired science.

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“…The 50-100 hexabundles plus sky fibres on Hector will be positioned on a glass field plate by robots called starbugs [28,29,30,31,32] . The Hector starbugs will be a progression of the technology developed to produce the 180 starbugs for the Taipan multi-object spectroscopic galaxy survey [16] .…”

Section: Positioner: Starbugsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hector: a new massively multiplexed IFU instrument for the Anglo-Australian Telescope

et al. 2016

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Hector [1,2,3] will be the new massively-multiplexed integral field spectroscopy (IFS) instrument for the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) in Australia and the next main dark-time instrument for the observatory. Based on the success of the SAMI instrument, which is undertaking a 3400-galaxy survey, the integral field unit (IFU) imaging fibre bundle (hexabundle) technology under-pinning SAMI is being improved to a new innovative design for Hector. The distribution of hexabundle angular sizes is matched to the galaxy survey properties in order to image 90% of galaxies out to 2 effective radii. 50-100 of these IFU imaging bundles will be positioned by 'starbug' robots across a new 3-degree field corrector top end to be purpose-built for the AAT. Many thousand fibres will then be fed into new replicable spectrographs. Fundamentally new science will be achieved compared to existing instruments due to Hector's wider field of view (3 degrees), high positioning efficiency using starbugs, higher spectroscopic resolution (R=3000-5500 from 3727-7761Å, with a possible redder extension later) and large IFUs (up to 30 arcsec diameter with 61-217 fibre cores). A 100,000 galaxy IFS survey with Hector will decrypt how the accretion and merger history and large-scale environment made every galaxy different in its morphology and star formation history. The high resolution, particularly in the blue, will make Hector the only instrument to be able to measure higher-order kinematics for galaxies down to much lower velocity dispersion than in current large IFS galaxy surveys, opening up a wealth of new nearby galaxy science.The overarching science goal is to understand the physical basis for the diversity of galaxy properties in the local Universe. Substantial steps forward have been possible with smaller surveys such as SAMI, which have sufficient sample sizes to study the properties of galaxies as a function of their mass and local environment, but the diversity of galaxies is driven by more than just these two parameters. The accretion and/or merger history of a galaxy is fundamental to its morphology and star formation history, but to date it has been hard or impossible to capture the diversity of accretion histories observationally. The broader large-scale environment is also known to be important in determining a galaxy's structure via tidal torques. Only with Hector targeting 100,000 galaxies can we hope to probe the detailed physics of galaxy formation in these two extra dimensions of accretion history and large-scale environment. Specifically, the integral field data from Hector can provide specific angular momentum, higher order velocity moments, mis-alignments between gas and stars as well as measure dynamical disturbance. All of these tracers provide a view into accretion and merger history, which when combined with the unprecedented sample size of Hector will allow us to connect a galaxy's specific history to its current state. By connecting these properties to the network of large-scale structure we will be able to show h...

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Starbugs: all-singing, all-dancing fibre positioning robots

Cited by 22 publications

References 9 publications

Astrophotonic Spectrographs

Astrophotonic Spectrographs

Performance of a Novel PMMA Polymer Imaging Bundle for Field Acquisition and Wavefront Sensing

Hector: a new massively multiplexed IFU instrument for the Anglo-Australian Telescope

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