Novembre 2020

Congratulations to Mathieu VACHEY for hi Ph.D degree granted this November 25th for his work on “Next generation spectro-imagers for Universe and Earth observation” !
Congratulations to Grégoire HEIN for hi Ph.D degree granted this November 23rd for his work on “Optical Segmentation of focal planes using freeform optics” !
Welcome to Emile KLOTZ, new Ph.D student to join the team this year ! Emile will work on “Dynamical reconfiguration of a network of optical ground stations assisted with machine learning”, supervized by Thierry FUSCO from GRD and Sidonie LEFEBVRE at ONERA. Welcome !
GRD also had its annual All-Hands meeting this month, in which we welcomed all our new PhD students, new postdoc, and new faculties and introduced the team, its organization, and its activities.
This November was also the formal presentation of the LAM-ONERA Common Research Lab to the LAM Science council and staff. This structure is created to secure and develop their common activities around high angular resolution.
In November, we also successfully polished 2 new super-polished off-axis parabolas for the Roman Space Telescope Coronagraphic Instrument, with mid-spatial frequencies errors of less than 2nm rms. They will be delivered to JPL mid-December. Congrats to the team !
Also, the freeform primary mirror of the CASTLE telescope has been completed at Winlight Optics, with an exquisite surface quality (15nm RMS surface error, 6nm HF, 1nm roughness) and the Dome has also been ordered this month. It will be installed on top of the Calar Alto Observatory during Spring next year.
Finally, a new project has been formally kicked off this month in the team, named ESCAPE (Exoplanetary Systems with our Coronagraphic Archives Processing Engine). This project is the PhD topic of Chen XIE and aims at developing new processing methods for high-contrast imaging based on archives mining.