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Ep. 11: Where research transforms space exploration

Hear how Prof Alan Smith and researchers at UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory and our partner, Teledyne UK, design devices like Gaia, the ESA's optical telescope to chart a 3D map of the Milky Way

Host and Producer

  • Dr Rosie Anderson, Research Fellow, Public Health Policy team, UCL

Guest

  • Professor Alan Smith, Professor of Detector Physics, Dept of Space & Climate Physics, Faculty of Maths & Physical Sciences

Transcript

Rosie Anderson  
Hello and welcome or welcome back to the podcast where research transforms lives. I'm Dr. Rosie Anderson and every Thursday the summer, I'm inviting you to take a deep dive with me into the UCL research that has changed the world around you. This time we're going planet hunting with Plato. Plato being the upcoming planetary transits and oscillations of the stars mission from the European Space Agency, and the instruments that we'll be using to detect planets and distant galaxies were developed here at UCL in the Mullard Space Science Labs. These super sensitive optical sensors, called Charge Coupled Devices or CCDs, are often the sensor of choice for space science missions, and their performance in the harsh conditions of space is critical to the mission success. The Mullard Space Science Lab CCD sensors have helped create a 3d map of the Milky Way and will soon be hunting for the origin of the universe on the European Space Agency's Euclid probe. Behind all this boldly going is a long standing partnership between MSSL and Teledyne, UK, one of the leading manufacturers of CCDs. Over 300 devices have been evaluated and MSSL specialist instrument science facilities and results have helped develop ever more sophisticated sensors and help the company win major contracts. I spoke with MSSL's Professor Alan Smith, about what it takes to see the limits of the universe.

Let's start by saying that we should have had David Morris, Chief Engineer of Space Imaging at Teledyne UK. With us today sadly, he is not well. So we aren't able to go on location to meet him which would also be a first for the series, the podcast series, sadly, not to space to Chelmsford. But you know, it's all exciting. And, and we just hope, David, if you do listen to this, that you're getting better. But Alan, you're going to stand in and you're going to explain everything about about your work with with David and with Teledyne. So if you're up for the challenge of, sure, yeah. Yeah. So first of all, why would you want to look for things in Deep Space? Why would you want to look for things in space at all? And particularly things like planets? Why would you want to map the Milky Way?

Alan Smith  
Astronomy is one of the sometimes called the second oldest profession, that when mankind or humankind has had an interest in the stars, and the workings of the universe. And we find that the more we understand about the world around us, the more comfortable it is to live in, really. Most technology derives from science in one way or another. So there's a public interest in space, there's no doubt about that. People are inspired by things to do with astronomy, some of the most attractive images that people see are those of astronomical objects, but also interested in our origins. Where do we come from? Why are we here? What's outside the what's beyond the blue sky? So I think there's there's a number of reasons, I'll briefly explain why I do it. But there's a number of reasons. Curiosity driven science is at one level, but I see space science just as a branch of physics. There are things in space, which we cannot easily reproduce on the Earth - circumstances, pressures, densities, temperatures, all sorts of things won't, we can't hope to be produced on the earth in experimental form. But to test our laws of physics, we need to look at things in space where the rules don't apply that apply on the earth. And so x, x is private, extrasolar planets. In our solar system, we have eight, we have 1000s to look at, and they're all different. They're all very different in their nature, extraordinarily different in their nature. And we learn a lot from studying those those objects in space. And to do that, we need some really quite fancy technology. Yeah. So

Rosie Anderson  
I thought when I was thinking about, well, how do I approach this without David? And I was thinking I should ask start by asking Alan, why, why, why do we need Charge Coupled devices? But then I was like, Well, why would you want to do the things that you do with Charge Coupled devices in the first place? But what are Charge Coupled devices? Because that's what your case study was about? So?

Alan Smith  
Yeah, absolutely. So so they're, they're, they're basically detectors, which you they're a bit like a photographic plate where you can project an image onto the surface of the charge coupled device, and it will, it will remember the scene that it sees, but instead of doing this by some sort of photographical photographic chemical process, it does it by a Using the individual packets of light that poured on the device and turning those into an electric thing that storing that electric signal on the device, and then when asked to quiet the reading out that signal into some computer system, so we, we convert the light image into an electrical image. And then we move the image of the problem. And the, in a way that the great asset of Charge Coupled devices is that you can have millions of individual pixels, which individually measure the brightness, the light, just on your dislike on your high definition TV, we can have millions of those pixels, but getting them getting them off the device and into your computer is enormously tricky. You can't have on Plato, we have 16 million pixels in each device. And you just can't have 16 million different chains of electronics, transferring the data. So we have to have some sort of system that shuffles the charge around so that you can actually do it with just two chains of electronics. And that's how we do it with a CCD. So it's a charge couple, which means the charge moves from one pixel to another. And you shuffle the the charge around the pixels and then take them out of the node at the end. It's very clever. But the problem is the poor old charge has to go a long way, in its terms, to get from where it is to the output node, it may have to be shuffled, you know, many 1000s of times, and in each shuffle, all sorts of bad things can happen to it. So there's quite a lot of depth to the understanding of how easy it is. Well,

Rosie Anderson  
yeah. So would it be simplifying it too much to say, it sounds a little bit like a composite i. And the way that that relays information to the brain is that you know,

Alan Smith  
that probably making it more complicated, to be honest, is is, is worse. In actual fact, it's very, very simple. It's really just like moving a rook on a chessboard. And you go down the column and across the rows, is how you do it. You've just got to do that a large number.

Rosie Anderson  
How does a charge coupled device differ from other similar light sensors? I don't know, say, or indeed image capturing? I don't know what we have in our phones or whatever. And why do you need something like that? To do this in space?

Alan Smith  
Yeah, there are, there are other sorts of devices, some, I won't go through them, but they all have their advantages and disadvantages, to be honest, and charge coupled device has advantages and that you can get very large format, they have relatively low power consumption. They, but they have some disadvantages that they're a little bit sensitive to damage by the radiation of space, the cosmic rays in space, etc, they can do damage to it for for the particular applications we use them for. They're just like the best choice of available devices. Those common reason is that they provide the largest format, right size of pixels, etc. I would say though, that in the future, and where we are working with Teledyne the future is is moving on to if you like the next generation of these images, now that some of the colour CMOS devices coming on, we are we're moving to them that that doesn't mean to say we're abandoning Charge Coupled devices, there's a similarity between them, there's a connection between them. And it's it's our understanding of CCDs. That's allowed us if you'd like to move on to these other other novel types of devices. This is sort of an evolutionary process, which we are sort of engaged with with with Toledo.

Rosie Anderson  
Yeah, so I'll come on to your relationship with Teledyne and how that happened. But I'm curious to know about you, because how on earth did you wind up designing optical sensors for space exploration? Was that something you just always wanted to do from a child? Or was this something that happened to you?

Alan Smith  
In the end of the day, the optical sensors for space exploration, I like the solution to a problem. But this is not the only problem I've ever been involved in, in my life. So I began like from a very early age as being a very interested in astronomy. I did a PhD working on sounding rockets, flying out of rubra. And I was interested in both the astronomy and the technology that was putting the what was being used to pursue the astronomy that went on to work with European Space Agency and involved in other technologies used or sensors and satellites. eventually turned up at UCL, I had a sort of an interest in photon sensors of one sort or another. And PCBs just happened to be the right one at the right time.

Rosie Anderson  
How did you come to have this relationship with Teledyne, then and maybe it would be good to start by explaining exactly what Teledyne are and what they do?

Alan Smith  
Well, Teledyne when we first worked with it, we've been working with Teledyne for a long time. And this has probably been working with them for more than 40 years. But I've been I've joined MSL, UCL about 30 years ago. So that's the Mullard, space science knowledge base. And at that time, there was already good working relationships from Toronto, Canada, at the time, they were called into the English, which interests electric valves or something. And then they were taken over more recently in 2017, by an American company called Teledyne who are a bigger player, if you like in this field, they've been working on sensors and selling sensors to each other, they've been working selling sensors for years, and we were one of their customers, really, they have a reputation and very deserved reputation of producing probably the highest quality sensors of this type anywhere in the world are extremely good at what they do. They are that they are I wouldn't like to say Rolls Royce got told off by Robert was saying this, but they are the best, the best debaters of sexes, they don't really make sense of that getting your mobile phone, they're pretty good, you get them from Japan or somewhere. But these are that these are a mark above that, because they need, we need to understand it really very precisely how they work, they need to be extremely reliable, and, and perform extremely well. And so there was a growing relationship. We had a, I remember a contract we had with Lockheed Martin in the States back in probably about 99 To where we act as we acted as the procure, we bought the devices from into v. And then we added value by putting them through a sort of a calibration process. And in that calibration process, we learned a lot more about the devices. And we share that, of course with factory TV. So E TV, we're making better devices because of us. And we were we were benefiting on that relationship because they were telling us about their devices in great detail. And so it was a symbiotic relationship, which has just grown and grown since then we've had a number of other programmes. And most of them had the same basic structure. Teledyne on the producers of the devices, they they're a little bit like micro micro electronics. They produce the devices and they're incredibly clean environments, etc. We get to calibrate them, we feed back we usually build the electronics that reads out the devices. And that's non trivial. And then it either we or more often because they're very expensive. Something like the European Space Agency actually pays Teledyne for the devices. In the Plato's case. It's you know, it's the on 40 million pounds worth of devices that have been procured from Teledyne, which all of which will come through us and be studied by us and then passed on to the spacecraft.

Rosie Anderson  
Yeah, because that's a huge amount of money. I think when we think of space exploration, we tend to think a lot about, you know, the wonder of it, what we started this interview with, and I think that's what fires people's imaginations. And that's very appropriate. But, but obviously, this is a highly competitive industry as well, isn't it? And Teledyne and your lab are plugged into this global industry and market for technology. had David been here? I'd be asking him about this too. But could you explain for our listeners, why that industry and why that market exists and how it's how it relates to other things, how it relates to other products, how it relates to things that maybe aren't based around space exploration, but are actually part of our very terrestrial world?

Alan Smith  
Well, in terms of in terms of Teledyne, and what they do is that they produce all sorts of other technologies, but let's just focus on their imaging area. Scientific images is where their specialities so they've chosen not to go down the mass production route for say, mobile phones, cameras in the phones or the cameras in the the the Canon camera that you might buy in the High Street. They've what they've gone for is with the more sort of institutional scientific use of such sensors Some of that is space, but most of their actual market is is more ground based things, sensors, sensors of this type are used all over science, you quite often need to image something. They can be configured in all sorts of clever ways that you might not imagine not just simple images. But because you can move the charge around, you can move the image as the as the object moves across the screen, for instance. So you can do all sorts of fancy imaging techniques, they're using a lot of ground based astronomy, lots and lots of ground based telescopes around the world are using Teledyne or e to the sensors in numerous instruments that sit on their focal planes. And so they really specialised in that area that I would say that the when the new technology comes along quite often it's requires a thorough understanding that technology technology before you can really commercialise it. So it's needed. This all started off with CDs were invented in Bell Labs back in the 60s in the stack. And, you know, once that sort of understanding of the physics that's going on within those books were possible, then the more commercial spin offs occurred. So the cameras that you see in your mobile phones, or the or the street cameras, and all those sorts of things, you can route them all back to places like Bell Labs, which was trying, trying to get to grips with a particular process that's going on within silicon. And, and what Teledyne have done is focused on the science application, others have taken this technology and run off and produce commercial products. And, you know, the the camera on my laptop is is just if you like an extension of that process,

Rosie Anderson  
and presumably everybody's laptop, anyway. No, you don't have a special going laptop or something? No? Well, that's I think that's a good illustration. Because I mean, trying to look at Silicon, the structure of silicon and searching for planets in deep space, to my mind is very different. But actually, the technology, it seems you're saying is fundamentally it's, it has the same ancestry. And it's just that it's been picked up and used in all sorts of different applications. Is that right? It

Alan Smith  
is, but the thing about the thing in space science is really that you, you choose the best tool that you can find for the job that you have to do. And space science is really very, very competitive. It's, it sounds like a lot of money, but there are actually relatively few science missions that are flown across the world. And so when you when you sort of add it all up and say how much is the man in the street spending a year on space science, it's a it's about one Euro a year. So that's, it's, you know, it's not a vast amount of money for the individual. And but it's a, it's a very, very competitive. So that means we have to, we really have to when we propose the mission, we have to propose the best possible return on the clock, the value, the cost. So we have to have the best possible science return for this judged by other scientists and people like that. But we get the best possible return. And so we need the best possible instrumentation. And that's why we work closely with with ETV, because working together, we can make that case. And we've made it very well for a number of missions.

Rosie Anderson  
Yeah, I think probably that's something which a lot of people, myself included, actually wouldn't necessarily think about as being part of the part of the calculation that goes into what to back and what not to back. You know, the what you described as the science return, but that that has, you can quantify that in various ways, but includes the benefit will have the knock on benefit to all sorts of other industries, all sorts of other technologies, you know, the adaptation of that technology. But I was struck by something you were saying before, which is that it takes a long time for this sort of exploratory and sophisticated science, to be ready to be used in those ways, even even to use it in that initial space mission, which then goes on in the future. It's to have all sorts of other knock on benefits. I'm just thinking that that's a long game, when it comes to investment when it comes to people's careers, all sorts of things and you know, longer even then than some of the other things that we've talked about in in this podcast series. So are there any particular challenges that come with being part of a world that works on over that long game?

Alan Smith  
Well, I mean, it's for that for the individual scientist who's Working in, in an area of technology, the challenge is that someone comes up with something better, before you get there, so it is competitive. So you might spend 10 years of your life developing what you think is the best, the best infrared detector ever made, and then some guy in Belgium or something comes up with a better one. And no one talks to you again, basically, because there's no reason for them to. So it can be a bit like that. And you go, if you go to conferences, where people are sort of like presenting their wares, just talking about the work they're doing, it is actually quite competitive. And in order to get a grant to do something, you need to make the case that what you're doing is a, you know, a world class level. These days, grants are just as competitive. So if you don't make the case that you are, this will put you at the front of something, then you're not gonna get, you're not gonna get funded. So you do have to take a bit of a risk. And it's a it is a long term view. We see artificial intelligence at the moment, everyone's talking about artificial intelligence. But that technology has been bubbling up for years and years and years. And now we're starting to see it become a bit more ubiquitous. And I think that you see that sequence run through,

Rosie Anderson  
I think it also helps make sense of why you would have such an ongoing and tight relationship with not just Teledyne, but presumably lots of other partners in the industry itself. I think there's a long standing belief in the public imagination that you know, science and research in general happens, and then people do things with the what comes out of that. But what you're describing is a world where you can't really afford to be out of that loop. It can't be quite like that, can it?

Alan Smith  
No, that's absolutely right. And there's so many reasons why we should work closely with sort of commercial or industrial partners, it's that there's layers and layers of reasons why we should, at the highest level, it tells us more, we can influence what they do so that they can direct their direct their developments in the direction that we want to go. But also, you know, we enable them to be more profitable. But that there's all sorts of other levels like make them aware of future possible markets, different uses for the devices, we can train their staff and our and our offices and our universes and they go back to work there. We can provide training courses to learn all sorts of things, at many different levels within the organisation. It's the trick is to see it from each other's point of view. And that's why we get on pretty well with very well with tele di is that we understand where they're coming from and they understand where we're coming from.

Rosie Anderson  
So you and Teledyne work very symbiotically in designing and making the sensors and then they sell them on to people who are launching specialty space missions. Could you tell us where some of your sensors have been installed? Who's use them? What kind of missions have they been part of?

Alan Smith  
We just went back to them how they work. And they and they take it from there. So we're not going to presume that we were the sole route to market we'd be looking at. So what we are is we're working in space sector. So we've we've provided devices to for instance, so the physics missions, satellites, observing some sounds a very nice thing to image. We've provided devices that you mentioned the galaxies or the Gaia mission. We've we've been working there with Gaia, and this is mapping with enormous precision, unbelievable precision, the positions and movements of millions of stars in our galaxy. We've also were, if it wasn't for the issue in Ukraine, we would have blown the Euclid mission which is looking at the dark universe, the looking at the dark matter and dark energy processes within the universe of other BPS submission, which is just waiting to be flown when we find a replacement rocket for it. And, and, and many other smaller applications of devices all the time. And Plato is the if you like the last one, though, I have to say it's probably got the largest number of devices or at least the largest surface area of devices we've ever been engaged with with the very big programmes

Rosie Anderson  
from the point of view of just an individual listening to this just a A person like me, who doesn't know an awful lot about space exploration or the space industry? Why should they be excited beyond the curiosity? Let's say you found somebody who's utterly in curious about what's out there. But who or who's purely concerned with their everyday life, how your work contributes to everybody's Everyday everyday life being a little better in some way? What is that scientific return on the investment that we put into the kind of work that you do? From the point of view of people who don't go anywhere near outer space? Which is most talking?

Alan Smith  
No, it's a very good question. So how I would answer it is I'll answer it from a national level. Okay, so the UK needs to do needs to earn its living somehow as a country. And certain avenues are sort of close to us. We don't do as much shipbuilding or coal mining on things like that. What we're what we seem to do really, really well is develop new technologies. And in order to develop new technologies aren't just a guy in a garage inventing something, new technologies take a long time to develop. And at the heart at the base of that development is a fundamental understanding of that, if you'd like the science behind the technology, you've got to have that in order to develop it. So if we want to live in an economy which is based on being at the edge of new technologies, then the sorts of things that we're doing with Teledyne and that's going on all over all over the place in all over academia, classroom, Teledyne, that's an essential requirement to live in sorts of country that we live in. We're not an agricultural base country that we do that, but we it's future technologies that are our way forward.

Rosie Anderson  
That's all for now. I hope to see you next time where I will be talking to Professor Jennifer Hudson, about helping governments and charities build public support for sustainable international development. If you can't wait until then, and want to hear more about the impact of UCL research on society in the world, then why not take a listen to Made at UCL presented and produced by our students. Finally, I want to thank Professor Alan Smith, our guest and of course you our listeners

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