Question: Tell me more about the starbugs☺

James Gilbert answered on 15 Jun 2015:

Starbugs solve a problem that astronomers will face when we build what are called ‘next generation telescopes’ over the next few years. These new telescopes will be so big that plugging in different instruments to do different types of observations will be hard work..

It makes sense to observe as many stars or galaxies as you can, all at the same time. You get more data this way (obviously). You can do this with optical fibres, which are fine strands of glass that light travels down, a bit like water goes down a hose pipe, except that light bounces off the inside of the fibre.

Anyway, you put an optical fibre so it catches the rays of light coming from a particular star, and another fibre to catch the light coming from another star, and so on for hundreds of stars. Then you clump the other ends of these fibres together and feed them into a spectrograph to analyse the spectrum of light for each star.

The problem is repositioning these fibres between observations. In next gen telescopes, we need a way to move all the fibres quite a long way (say 15 or 20cm) quite quickly (a minute or two), BUT with really high accuracy: if you don’t put the fibre within a hundredth of a millimetre of you target, then the light from the star missed the fibre and never gets analysed.

Starbugs solve this problem in a really neat way. You basically attach small legs to the end of each optical fibre and then using electronics you can make every fibre ‘walk’ to its new target! Without Starbugs, there would be no easy way to do astronomy with big telescopes because it would take a human hours to reconfigure everything by hand.

It’s quite a specific problem, but science is full of these specific problems to solve. However, Starbugs can actually be used to move anything, and so one thing I’m looking at is how my work can ‘transfer’ to other areas, maybe in other areas of science (microscopes maybe), or even industry to help manufacture things.