Question: Explain more about Steeve

James Gilbert answered on 16 Jun 2015:

Hi Matthew,

Sorry I missed this question before. Steve is what’s called a ‘pick-and-place’ robot, and he can solve a very specific problem in astronomy.

There is a telescope in the canary islands called the WHT that is about 30 years old, and people were wondering whether to demolish it or not. My teammates came up with an idea to build a brand new ‘multi-object spectrograph’ for the WHT, which could make maps of the stars and galaxies in the sky with more detail than ever before. A multi-object spectrograph is able to record the electromagnetic spectrum of many objects at once, so you can analyse the ‘colour’ of the light of about 1000 stars (or galaxies) all at once.

The only problem is we don’t have lots of money to build this instrument, as most of it is being spent on brand new (and very impressive) telescopes that won’t be ready for a few years..

The problem with multi-object spectrographs is they rely on lots of (about 1000) thin optical fibres (the same things that make fibre optic broadband so fast – they guide light rays) being quickly moved around so that they catch the light from the stars and galaxies you want to analyse.

Steve is actually a robot usually used to assemble circuit boards in factories, but I’m hacking him to do our job. The advantage of using robots already used for something else is they’re much cheaper! So we think we can build our instrument for the WHT well within budget 🙂

Without a robot configuring our instrument, it would take someone hours and hours to do something that Steve can do in minutes!

Hope that answers your question.. feel free to ask more!