Nouvelles

In Memoriam of André Baranne, founder of the group
C’est avec une grande tristesse que nous avons appris la disparition, mardi 26 Janvier, de notre collègue André Baranne. En plus d’être un opticien de génie, et le père des spectrographes à vitesse radiale modernes tel qu’ELODIE qui permit la détection de la première exoplanète autour de l’étoile 51Pegasus par M. Mayor et D. Queloz, il fut également le fondateur du Laboratoire d’Optique de l’Observatoire de Marseille (LOOM), devenue aujourd’hui notre équipe GRD.

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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.

Congratulations to Sabri LEMARED for his Ph.D degree granted this September 30th for his work on “Stress-polishing of large light-weight space mirrors for Earth and space observations” !
Congratulations to Simona LOMBARDO for wining the Rising Talent prize for Women from the L’Oreal Foundation – UNESCO, recognizing her work for developing the CASTLE inovative telescope !
Also this month, the traditional GRD seminars are starting again after the summer break. A new duet formed by Iva LAGINJA and Felipe PEDREROS BUSTOS are taking over the organization. Stay tuned for the upcoming seminars !
This month, our new GRD member Faustine CANTALLOUBE has published an article in Nature Astronomy about the impact of climate change on large observatories (https://rdcu.be/b61Oh). This paper is part of a special issue about Climate change in Nature Astronomy. Congrats for this major work !

The National Specific Action for High Angular Resolution (ASHRA) has selected three GRD members to sit in its Scientific Committee : Benoit NEICHEL and Elodie CHOQUET, along with Service Optics Anne COSTILLE, as LAM representatives, and Jean-François SAUVAGE as ONERA representative. This is a strong representation among a total of 14 members. https://ashra.oca.eu/fr/composition/.
Due to the COVID19 travel restriction, the summer School about High Angular Resolution, initally planned at OHP, is now going virual and the teaching team is working hard to making it a great school regardless ! The new format now allows to have even more students, we are now aiming at 50 students attending.