Sergio Salata, Astronomy Project Manager of Added Value Solutions in Tenerife visits the TMT office in California on 20 July 2023. Sergio (far-right) joins a group of Caltech astronomy summer undergraduate research students, led by Prof. Matthew Graham (center), Project Scientist for the Zwicky Transient Factory.
On 18 July 2023, Sergio Salata, Astronomy Project Manager of Added Value Solutions (AVS) in Tenerife, visited the TMT office to tell us about the astronomy projects and other science equipment development projects AVS had been involved with. His short talk and discussion with project staff covered astronomy instrumentation, cooling, cryostats, opto-mechanics and other topics of relevance to TMT development.
On the 20th, Sergio joined a group of Caltech astronomy summer undergraduate research students, led by Prof. Matthew Graham, Project Scientist for the Zwicky Transient Factory, to visit the TMT lab. The four students were working on a variety of research programs, all of which have a connection to the science areas that motivate the building of TMT, including exoplanet transit identification, modeling of electromagnetic signature gravitational wave sources and their identification in wide field astronomical surveys, and machine learning to improve transient characterization and provide better alert streams from wide field surveys.
"The biggest realization of the students was that building a major telescope facility is much more technically complex and requires much more engineering development than they ever imagined!" said Warren Skidmore, System Scientist at TMT.
