Programme
Ground-Based Astronomical Instrumentation
Delivering facility‑class imaging and spectroscopic instruments for major telescopes worldwide, focused on wide‑field survey capability in the visible and near‑infrared wavebands. This programme has a proven track record of enabling high‑impact astronomy, from the VISTA infrared camera’s long‑term dataset to WEAVE’s next‑generation spectroscopic surveys, enabling the large, high‑quality datasets that modern astronomy depends on, supporting curiosity‑driven research into how stars and galaxies form and evolve across the local and distant Universe.
Programme Aims
The programme aims to develop facility-class instrumentation for exploitation by UK scientists and international partners including.
This includes:
- Delivering wide‑field survey facilities for 4‑metre‑class telescopes, including VISTA and WEAVE
- Developing ground‑breaking instruments for 8‑metre‑class telescopes, including FMOS and KMOS
- Contributing to the development of the world’s largest telescope – the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) – through the support of the MOSAIC and HARMONI instruments.
Our work
The programme takes instruments from early concept proposals through top‑level architecture to deployment on operational observatories, with a focus on survey‑scale performance and scientific legacy.
Instrument concept development
Instrument concepts are developed into deployable architectures for telescope facilities, supporting wide‑field imaging and high‑throughput spectroscopy designed for survey science.
Science-driven data delivery
Instrument development is shaped around the full pathway to scientific value, ensuring that instruments not only deliver the required observations, but also observation design, curation and exploitation.
Consortium building and collaboration
Delivery is enabled through consortium building and support, connecting engineers and scientists across the community and maintaining links with industrial partners to realise complex, facility‑class instrumentation
The WEAVE prime-focus corrector and positioner at the William Herschel telescope in La Palma, Spain. (ING)
Case Study Highlight
William Herschel Telescope Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE)
WEAVE is a major upgrade to the William Herschel Telescope, led by RAL Space and the University of Oxford, and designed to capture high‑resolution spectra from nearly 1,000 objects simultaneously. Over the next five years, WEAVE is expected to conduct a 1,200‑night survey, collecting more than 12 million spectra to support research including mapping dark matter in the Milky Way and studying galaxy evolution.
