Cranfield University reaches for the stars

Looking into the night sky you may see a few stars and the moon. Astronomers, however, are looking for more than this – they are looking for Earth-like planets, which, with a little help from Cranfield University, they may be able to find.

As part of a four-year collaborative project, Cranfield University professors Paul Shore, Dave Stephenson and John Nicholls, together with Dr David Walker and Dr Peter Doel, both of University College London, and OpTIC Technium, are set to establish a unique UK national facility in North Wales for making large optics.

The project, also involving three industrial partners – Cranfield Precision, Zeeko Ltd and Rapt Industries, has been made possible by a £3.526m grant from the UK Joint Research Council’s Basic Technology Programme.

Professor Shore explained the ambitious project: “Scientists attempting to find Earth-like planets near to far-away stars have their job made more difficult because, unlike stars which are bright, Earth-like planets are not. This makes them harder to see, so the plan is to build extremely large telescopes to try and find them.

“It is here we will be making our mark by developing a new ultra precision processing facility for finishing the optics, or segments as we refer to them, which interlock to produce the extra large telescopic mirrors.

“In precision production engineering terms, the manufacture of these segments for the next generation of large telescope designs is probably the most significant precision engineering challenge we have seen,” said Professor Shore. “The aim is to produce ultra precision surfaces at ten times the accuracy and with ten times greater speed than current state-of-the-art.

“Each partner involved in this project is a key piece of the jigsaw and it is only when we work together as a cohesive team that we can offer the UK the possibility of moving into the market selling segments for such telescopes.”

These telescopes are extremely large indeed and scientists in the US are building one that is 30m in diameter – the size of a tennis court – while the most ambitious telescope design concept is 100m diameter – approaching the size of the new Wembley stadium.