Designing, building and operating telescopes and instruments is incredibly multi-disciplinary work, depending on the stage of the project, the nature of your messenger (photons/particles/gravitational waves) and, if your instrument detects photons, their wavelengths. You could work on early-stage technology development in the lab, technological research, building an on-sky instrument, providing ground segment support for a space mission, or participating in commissioning and early science observations of a new instrument.
As a result, many skills are valuable in astronomical instrumentation:
- Optical design
- Opto-mechanical and mechanical engineering
- Electrical engineering
- Systems engineering
- Software engineering
- Data management/data engineering
- Project management
- Astrophysics research experience
If your project is based in the lab, working on a new technique or technology, you may be responsible for aspects of mechanical and optical design, electronics, software and data analysis in a very hands-on way. This will give you the opportunity to gain some experience in some of the fields listed above, which are very valuable. It may also make the day to day work more varied, which you may enjoy. Such work is not so different from an observational astrophysics project, in that you design an experiment, collect data, analyse and test hypotheses.
Some aspects of this work can be more frustrating than independent pure research work, in that you may have to depend more on others: hardware purchasing can take a long time, deliveries can be delayed, components break, machine shops may be overloaded with work. Having an astronomy component to your research can help with this, as you can fill any “dead time” in your lab work with your astronomy research.
Technology development may also give you valuable opportunities to work with industry. If you’ll have to purchase very specialised equipment for your project, you may have the opportunity to visit factories or workshops. Some countries have schemes where companies can co-fund projects with academia for technology they have an interest in. A caveat to such schemes is that you should always ask whether the company will limit your ability to present and publish your work, and what will happen with the intellectual property from your research. If they plan to patent a new technology or technique, they may prevent you from publicizing any intermediate results, and you should always be aware of such limitations so you can make an informed decision.
If your project is part of a large instrumentation project or space mission, you are likely to work on a large multi-disciplinary team, which is different from an astrophysics research PhD. These projects are likely to follow a more rigid project structure and timeline. You may have to report to a Project Manager or a Systems Engineer, as well as your academic advisor. There may also be more administrative work involved, as instrumentation projects usually require technical documentation, user documentation or formal progress reports.
Prior to delivery to an observatory, instrumentation projects will go through different types of reviews, which require specific milestones to be reached, e.g. the Preliminary Design Review, Technical Readiness Review, Final Design Review. During these reviews the all aspects of the project will be reviewed by a board of experts. As a PhD student you may be able to participate or present in such reviews; while daunting, these are excellent opportunities to learn more about the way in which large projects are managed.
These structures and administrative requirements tend to be more formalised in space missions than for ground-based instrumentation - though going into the 30-m class telescope era, the ground-based community is adopting a more industry-style approach to projects as well.
An especially exciting time to work on an instrument is commissioning, when an instrument is installed on the telescope (or launched into space) and undergoes its first on-sky or in-orbit tests. Commissioning can be a very challenging period for a project, requiring long working hours in challenging conditions - unexpected results, software problems and on-the-fly troubleshooting are very common. But it's also extremely gratfiying to participate in the first-ever astrophyical observations with a new facility, and participating in a commissioning run during your studies is likely to be a very exciting experience.
As mentioned, software is an integral part of science. From controlling the telescope and instruments to reducing data different types of software skills are required. While traditionally astronomers define the requirements and describe use cases and software developers implement and maintain the final products, these roles have evolved thanks the popularity to high level languages such as Python and Matlab, which are either open source or easily accessible through educational licensing. Astronomers and instrument scientists are producing more and more software that are part of the daily operations.
There are various areas that may be of interest to astronomers who want to do more software:
- Observation planning, specifically finding target coordinates and guide stars
- Observation scheduling, target of opportunity insertion into queues
- Data archiving, mostly database related work, but also visualization (quick look)
- Instrument software customization, automation and improvement of instrument operations
- Algorithm development for data reduction pipelines
- Educational demo software for public outreach activities
Other software not traditionally done by astronomers includes:
- Telescope and instrument control system, including servo mechanisms
- Web applications, front ends for many data sources
- Configuration management
- Development of APIs for different layers of software
- Optimization, use of GPU and parallelization