Jarron Leisenring

Eagerly awaiting the continuation of this story.

Oh no…

There is no easy or quick fix in dismantling those structures and the forces at play. It’s going to take long term commitment from the community, those in leadership positions, and our collective organizations to reshape this framework. Let’s take that seriously.

It’s critical that we interrogate the power structures at play here. With the federal funding landscape in question, fundamental scientific inquiries are becoming more dependent on foundation support. And it’s important to ensure whims of individuals do not compromise our values.

What Sarah said.

Demon core experiment

roses are red
cherenkov is blue
just use a screwdriver
what's the worst it could do

a man in a suit and tie is sitting in front of a screen that says request denied ALT: a man in a suit and tie is sitting in front of a screen that says request denied

My emails:

Bruce! You didn’t even plot the location of the Solar System planets, so it’s not even useful for that!

Peter, it’s called a “niche.”

Over the past year, I've had to learn a lot about UV/visible CCDs since my previous experience revolved around IR detectors. So much credit goes towards my amazing team of engineers and technicians for explaining the ins and outs of the lab processes. I'm very thankful for this exciting opportunity!

YouTube video by Lockheed Martin Dazzling Lightning Captured by GLM

There are also currently nine ITL sensors in orbit on eight flight missions. This includes the hyperspectral imager on TEMPO and GEMS, OCI on the PACE mission, EPIC on DSCOVR, and SBSS. And the Geostationary Lightning Mapper on three GOES satellites (youtu.be/ue9wBkZv7vo).

Front of DESI imaging sensor placed in its shipping container. The sensor is an STA4150. Four green printed circuit boards surround the square sensor on all four sides with rounded sides to create a circular package.

DESI has made the largest 3D map of our universe to date and uses it to study dark energy. Credit: DESI collaboration and KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Proctor

We are continuing to contribute to the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI; www.desi.lbl.gov) as the project expands. DESI is similar to LVM in that it uses fiber-fed spectrographs with blue, red, and IR channels. We are also developing photon-counting detectors for future DESI (stay tuned!).

Inside the dome of the LVM instrument at Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile. The four black boxes contain the telescopes that make up the instrument; fiber optic cables behind the telescopes carry light into the integrated field unit (IFU) spectrographs. Image credit: Carnegie Observatories & SDSS collaboration.

The back of the Local Volume Mapper instrument (LVM-I) showing the cameras housing the ITL detectors. Image Credit: Nick Konidaris (Carnegie Observatories)

STA4850 sensor packaged for the LVM instrument. Square sensor with circuit boards on the near and far sides wire bond pads visible. The sensor and boards are attached to a gold-plated invar mechanical structure.

As part of the University of Arizona's contribution to SDSS-V partnership, ITL provided cryostats and packaged sensors for the Local Volume Mapper (LVM; www.sdss.org/dr19/lvm/) Instrument. This instrument has three spectrographs, each containing three wavelengths channels: blue, red, and IR.

A series of nine sensors mounted inside their aluminum shipping containers. Each sensor is a square shape showing a dark surface layer (silicon die with an anti-reflective coating) attached to a thicker gold-colored base.

Close up of nine sensors butted together in a 3x3 mosaic and mounted onto a single base plate, creating a "sensor raft." Other rafts can be seen in the background already inserted into the overall LSST camera focal plane. The foreground raft is pulled outward out-of-plane relative to the others as it is being inserted into its final position.

The fully assembled 3.2-gigapixel focal plane mounted at the telescope. This is 200 individual sensors combined into a single mosaic. Each sensor is 4096 x 4096 pixels. Image credit: Jacqueline Orrell/SLAC.

Drone picture of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory sitting atop its rocky summit on Cerro Pachón in Chile. The dome is open, showing the 8.4-meter mirror insides. Connected to the dome is a long white building that extends down and to the left connected to roadway that loops around the mountain. Two white pickup trucks can be seen parked at the foot of the building.

Most notably, ITL delivered over 120 science-grade sensors to Vera C. Rubin Observatory (rubinobservatory.org), contributing to nearly half of the LSST camera's focal plane. At 3.2 gigapixels, this is the world's largest digital camera and the largest project ITL has undertaken. We learned a lot!

ITL has delivered over 4,000 sensors to a variety of scientific communities. These sensors are primarily deployed in astronomical instruments, but have been used in Earth observing missions for climate satellites, semiconductor applications, high energy physics, and for many other applications.

This R&D has enabled ITL to become an end-to-end production lab where we dice the silcon wafers, hybridize the die, acid-etch and passivate the image surface, apply AR coatings, package onto a mechanical structure, and wirebond the electrical interconnects, then cryogenically test and characterize.

These sensors mostly operate in the UV, visible, and near-IR where silicon is sensitive. Custom thin film AR coatings narrow down the operating wavelength range. Every step in this process is optimized for maximizing the QE over the desired wavelength range, typically resulting in QE>95%.

ITL pioneered novel processes and techniques to manufacture large-format backside-illuminated silicon sensors with high QE, low dark current, and low read noise necessary for astronomical and scientific imaging. The lab mostly works with charged-coupled devices (CCDs), but also some CMOS experience.

Fish-eye view of a 2000 sqft clean room (ISO 7) showing a series of work tables and semiconductor manufacturing and analysis equipment. One person stands on the right working on a wafer probe station while another person to the left works on an automated wire-bonding / stud-bumping system.

Optics bench populated by an integrating sphere, monochromator, and laser-drive plasma light source. A TEC camera is mounted at the entrance port of the integrating sphere, which also houses LN2-cooled cryostats (not pictured).

It occurs to me that I never announced my *major* career news on this site. A little over year ago, I took over as Director of the Imaging Technology Lab (ITL; itl.arizona.edu) at U. of Arizona. Founded by Mike Lesser when I was still a nascent proto-astronomer, ITL makes scientific imaging sensors.

Being in the southwest, I heartedly approve of the instrument name. If you’re in the market for some sensors, I might know a guy.

Hey y'all. I'm hiring. Are you interested in building instruments for astrophysics?

wd5.myworkdaysite.com/recruiting/u...

Yep. It seems like the budget uncertainties from the past year are having the exact effect that everyone feared with fewer job postings across the board. All of our institutions are struggling to fill the gaps.

The Landscape of Undergraduate Astronomy and Astrophysics Degree Requirements In this document we summarize the results of a survey of undergraduate degree-granting programs conducted by the 2024-2025 American Astronomical Society Education Committee's Subcommittee on UndeRgrad...

Interesting paper on requirements for undergraduate astronomy degrees and how non-uniform they are, and how this impacts students with these degrees: arxiv.org/abs/2602.03959

Hmm… not a bad idea. 🤔

That was hard to read. The lack of hyphens is painful. And the adjective order...

Yeah, I’m old.

Bored of Peace

Yikes!

I’m sure the gambling industry is already taking bets.

😩