Constructing a Superfast Telescope

Several MSI PIs from the School of Physics and Astronomy and their colleagues and students are constructing two sets of extremely fast telescopes that will allow researchers to get astronomical data much more quickly than current telescopes allow. The group has received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation for this three-year project, called Total-Coverage Ultra-Fast Response to Binary-Mergers Observatory (TURBO). An article about the project is posted on the College of Science and Engineering website: U of M Leading $1 Million Grant to Build Superfast ‘TURBO’ Telescopes.

The MSI PIs participating in this project are:

• Assistant Professor Patrick Kelly (lead project investigator)

  • Professor Kelly uses MSI resources to carry out high-resolution simulations used to interpret data from the Hubble Space Telescope

• Assistant Professor Michael Coughlin

  • Professor Coughlin uses MSI’s computational resources to help identify variable objects.

• Professor Lucy Fortson

  • Professor Fortson uses MSI to support research from VERITAS, an array of telescopes that detects gamma rays, and for batch-processing images that will be uploaded to the Zooniverse citizen-science platform.

• Professor Vuk Mandic

  • Professor Mandic uses MSI to deploy statistical and data-processing techniques, including novel machine-learning algorithms, for research into dark matter and gravitational waves.

• Professor Claudia Scarlata

  • Professor Scarlata is working on several projects using MSI resources related to lya radiative transport and galaxy formation.