The Market
In any field, users, providers and suppliers must communicate and understand each other in order to do business effectively. Space science is no exception, and therefore part of this forum was devoted to orientation towards the needs and processes of these groups.
Dave Parker of Astrium, addressed the concerns of businesses trading in the UK space sector, and in particular the Institutional Space Business (e.g. government agency) sector.
This is characterised by structured programmes which are defined strategically along five to ten-year cycles. The customers (agencies) are generally "experts" in that they know what they want, how much to pay (naturally within the constraints of public funding) and a little bit about how they want the products to be built.
Innovation can be slow because, although new ideas are appreciated, institutional space project managers are (wisely) extremely risk-averse. Non-technical constraints, such as geographical return of contracts, can make life more interesting for industry contractors.
As an example of how industry is currently responding to the needs of smart optics technology users, James Barrington-Brown, of the consultancy Nohmia, presented a market assessment of deformable mirrors. This focused on supply-chain issues within the UK with particular focus on mirrors and their materials.
The results showed that a number of materials (Composites, Electro-formed metals/coatings, Beryllium) are coming to the fore, each with application-specific strengths. Greater co-ordination between applications groups is probably needed, as well as further links to work in active/smart structures (actuator technology being one possible crossover area).
Phillipe Gondoin of the European Space Agency (ESA) was on hand to offer the agency's view on the need for smart optics in future missions, and their approach to technology development. Several upcoming missions in infra-red and visible astronomy are unlikely to be feasible without breakthrough achievements in optics. Large, lightweight telescopes (Herschell, JWST, Gaia) are required as well as correspondingly large focal plane arrays, and new instrument concepts (NIRSpec, Darwin) require, for example, IR optical fibres, MEMS and IR integrated optics.
Some of these are already being stimulated through the ESA Technology Research Programme (TRP).
From the perspective of the British National Space Centre (BNSC), David Leadbeater addressed the meeting with encouragement to the Smart Optics community. The BNSC is the UK's chief policy-making body for space exploitation, and is able to advise institutions, agencies, businesses and other bodies, and to foster partnerships among them.
Particular UK strengths include small and micro satellites and robotic systems. Small satellites, of which there are a series of successful UK examples, require innovative materials, structures, and instrumentation (including optics) to deliver excellent results to the users from low cost and low mass platforms.
In order to succeed in winning support, particularly from UK/EU government sources, for technology development initiatives, he said, the smart optics community must be prepared to collaborate and submit more compelling proposals in order to be able to win against competion from other, more organised and mature, space engineering research fields, such as in Radar. Winning proposals will come from groupings of research teams who aim to build on their individual strengths, and on established UK strengths, and who can show that their work will contribute along the lines of an agreed roadmap for technological development. Such contributions could directly refer to user applications or to innovative enabling developments in the technology itself.
By producing a technology road-map the Faraday Partnership would make the existing expertise more accessible, whilst the BNSC would help to establish user requirements, facilitate the identification of key enabling technologies, and to support these technologies through national programmes. The European Space Agency is doing the same at a European scale.
As an example of a promising R & D approach, Alan Greenaway reported on the start-up of the OMAM (Optical Manipulation And Metrology) consortium, involving two universities (UCL and Heriot-Watt), the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, and three industry partners (Zeeko, Scalar and BAE Systems). The commercial goals, spanning a range of timescales, are focused on film and surface metrology applications leading to products with an established demand. There is a corresponding spread of research goals, both incremental and breakthrough, with support from PPARC and EPSRC. The theoretical underpinning is partly based on a generalisation of phase diverse functions in relation to wavefront sensing.
