Robots Are Speeding Up the Most Boring Job In Astronomy (sciencemag.org) 20
sciencehabit writes: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has, for more than 20 years, pioneered collecting spectra from millions of astronomical objects, from nearby stars to supermassive black holes. But this year, the survey is making a change: Instead of employing a small team of technicians for the daily chore of plugging optical fibers into preprepared plates so that -- when placed in the telescope -- they collect light from exactly the right position in the sky, the SDSS is going robotic. For the project's upcoming fifth set of surveys, plug plates are being replaced by 500 tiny robot arms, each holding fiber tips, that patrol a small area of the telescope's focal plane. They can be reconfigured for a new sky map in 2 minutes. Although such robot spectrographs have been built before, the SDSS is part of a rush to retrofit robots to older telescopes so astronomers can grab spectra from the wealth of interesting objects that will soon be streaming from new imaging surveys.
Machine 101 (Score:5, Interesting)
A: Anything that reduces human effort
Re: Machine 101 (Score:1)
Look at me! You're my machine now!
Re: (Score:2)
A machine is either a simple machine (a mechanical device that changes the direction or magnitude of a force) or anything that is made of simple machines. It's machines all the way down :)
Preferably known as the (Score:3)
And the upgrade (Score:2)
"Aziz Light Array" [youtu.be]
And they planned an upgrade :
The Mondoshawan. It's rating are Much better. [youtu.be]
The most boring job in astronomy (Score:2, Interesting)
when men were men (Score:3)
"robots" (Score:1, Offtopic)
Calling those arms in car factories "robots" always was a questionable choice of words.
But now it is quite ridiculous.
"robot" means "worker" by the way. As in "person that works at a factory". That kind that implies an autonomously acting individual.
Re: "robots" (Score:3)
Sweet (Score:1)
SDSS is fucking awesome... (Score:5, Informative)
For close to 20 years SDSS has generated a map of the universe that has mapped the location and distance of ~1 Billion galaxies in the observable universe visible from the telescope in California over about a 25 degree arc of sky.
This map is fucking awesome and can help give you a perspective on just how large the universe is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://sloan.org/programs/res... [sloan.org]
https://www.sdss.org/science/o... [sdss.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that the SDSS is fucking awesome -- I was a post-doc working on the project for five years in the 1990s. Thanks for the kind words!
However, the telescope is located at Apache Point, New Mexico, not in California.
Complicated Machinery (Score:5, Informative)
Instead, what they are now doing are a field of microstages that position the fiber bundles arbitrarily across the focal plane, so that the spectrograph can be reconfigured arbitrarily on the fly. To pack things in, each stage isn't a stacked X-Y stage, but rather a clever linkage that uses parallel kinematics to achieve the same end, with something approaching micron-level positioning accuracy. Repeat this times a few hundred or a few thousand, and you have a sense of the complexity of the machine they're putting together.
Son-of-FMOS (Score:2)
When I operated the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea (5-12 years ago), one of our instruments was the Fiber Multi-Object Spectrograph (FMOS), which had 400 fiber "spines" positioned by a system called Echidna. (Yes, that bit came from a land down under, and when a spine didn't get to its desired position, we'd get a pop-up dialogue saying so. Since there was nothing that could be done about that, the dialogue had a single button to acknowledge it, labeled "Bugger!")
Obligatory links to FMOS for a general audie [subarutelescope.org]
I applied for a job as a plate plugger (Score:4, Interesting)
My wife works there and I used to hang out there quite a bit, committing various acts of photography, except no one is allowed there now if you don't work there because of COVID. I interviewed for a plate plugging position, and I could have had the job but I knew my manual, mechanical speed just wasn't up to snuff for the job and declined the offer.
And it's not the most boring job in astronomy. There were a lot of facets to this one that kept it interesting, and you were working with other people doing it, so you could chat. The most boring would be aircraft spotting for the APOLLO lunar laser program when it's below zero due to wind chill. And I've done that. We did a five+ hour run during a lunar eclipse where we spent 40 minutes on the telescope level, 20 minutes in the lounge trying to warm up. We had three spotters, which allowed us to rotate one out every 20 minutes. It was too cold to do much chatting, you just shuffled around, trying to keep warm, which didn't work.
Re: (Score:2)
Since you are familiar with the whole thing...what is the purpose of this? As I read the story I guess what I'm taking away is that they don't capture the entire field of view of the telescope. Instead, they know where the objects are in that view and just capture the smaller areas. Almost like a form of data compression...they know where they expect things to just be black/empty, so they just throw that away those areas (thus it's lossy compression, because theres always a very slim chance something intere
Re: (Score:2)
There are two types of instruments in optical astronomy, broadly speaking: cameras and spectrographs. What we're talking about here is the latter. For both the Sloan 2.5 meter and APO's 3.5 meter ARC telescope, the instrument at the focal point can be swapped out by the operator. The cartridge is a large aluminum disc that acts as a filter by blocking out proverbially 99% of the sky and focusing a fiber on each object that they want to collect spectra data on, it could be a st