Tycho Brahe is among the first notable contributors to the design and development of instrumentation in astronomy. His meticulous care in ensuring that they were precise, and regularly calibrated led to meaningful changes in observational practices. Without this precision perhaps Kepler would have never discovered that planets move in an elliptical loop. When the telescope was invented in the seventeenth century, it was simply seen as “philosophical” because it provided scientists with natural philosophical truth. Its invention transformed the techniques of how natural philosophy was practised, ushering in questions about what constitutes science. The advancement of science and technology, therefore, has changed our view of the Universe.
In 1833 Thomas Henderson with a less-than-perfect mural circle at the Royal Observatory Cape of Good Hope managed to accurately determine the precise distance of Alpha Centauri. This was the first time the distance to a star (other than the Sun) was measured. Again technology proved crucial for the advancement of astronomical knowledge.
The importance of technology has not diminished; and its complexity has greatly increased. In the 70s there used to be one or two technical people on site who would be on call in Sutherland, now we have a suite of skills from all the engineering disciplines. Today’s telescopes get routine maintenance from instrumentation departments whose job is to construct, design, maintain, and develop detector packages. Also, telescopes have become bigger and more technologically forward than in the 1600s, hence the need for around-the-clock maintenance.
“Our engineering division these days is responsible for the development, design, construction, and deployment of instrumentation for telescopes and all associated technical requirements together with the infrastructure contained within the dome”, said Hitesh Gajjar, head of instrumentation at the South African Astronomical Observatory. To fully meet the astronomical instrumentation needs, skills across all engineering disciplines have to be utilised. In addition to the typical mechanical and electronic engineering, software development has become a very prominent feature of engineering in particular systems engineering which controls the interfaces between the traditional engineering fields. Within an observatory, design and development means working on the telescope components like the enclosure, the telescope structure, which houses all the optical components, and detector packages that get attached to instruments like the spectrographs, etc. The seamless and symbiotic relationship between all engineering disciplines results in instruments that meet big scientific goals.
Astronomers play a pivotal role in innovative instrument design by coming up with complex scientific questions, but because of the prohibitive cost of designing new instruments, a huge consideration is multiple user interests to ensure continuity and sustainability. Cutting-edge scientific research requires huge funding efforts, hence big instruments are usually jointly funded by multiple institutions. Data acquisition may seem like such a simple thing to consider since we already have telescopes, yet without sophisticated instruments that respond to those novel research questions, any forward-thinking endeavours are impossible. Scientific innovation requires ingenuity and creativity, having an in-house instrumentation department means there are many possibilities for also repurposing old instruments for niche scientific quests. New instrument development is a complex feat, that is, “Driven by scientifically relevant questions, and the ability to convert the question into a proposal to secure funding, thereafter a conceptualisation of an instrument and communicating the concept with a group of people – engineers and other scientific staff – and see the manifestation of physical instrumentation in order to meet that scientific question”, said Hitesh Gajjar. Talk about a fantastic symphony that births scientific and technological innovation.