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Astrophysics Group News

Sean Keen making adjustments to the MIRI, (Mid InfraRed Instrument), flight instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, during environmental testing in RAL Space's thermal vacuum chamber at STFC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, 16th August 2011. Credit: Stephen Kill, STFC

First instrument for the JWST completed and handed over to NASA


After more than ten years of work by over 200 engineers, the Mid InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), a camera so sensitive it could see a candle on one of Jupiter’s moons, has been declared ready for delivery by the European Space Agency and NASA. The MIRI Optical System, an instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that will eventually take up a position four times further away from the Earth than the Moon. It will now be shipped to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center where it will be integrated with the other three instruments and the telescope. More...

Dr David Kipping

RAS Keith Runcorn Prize for 2011 awarded to Dr David Kipping

Dr David Kipping is the 2011 recipient of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Keith Runcorn Prize for the best doctoral thesis in Geophysics.
More...

The star Fomalhaut and the belt of dust surrounding it, as seen in the far-infrared by the Herschel Space Observatory

Herschel sees dusty disc of crushed comets


Astronomers using ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory have studied a ring of dust around the nearby star Fomalhaut and have deduced that it is created by the collision of thousands of comets every day. More...

Listen: Searching through the stars for new planets

Dr Giovanna Tinetti, PhD student Ingo Waldmann and Prof. Jonathan Tennyson FRS  talk to Adam Smith at the Pod Academy about their work on exoplanets and NASA’s Kepler mission More...


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Research

Welcome to the research pages of the Astrophysics Group. The main research topics are listed in the left-hand menu, incorporating the following sub-groups:

In addition, we are linked to:

We also work closely with the following groups at UCL:

Page last modified on 16 jul 10 13:26 by Fabrizio Sidoli