The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

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Thomas Gauron

Center for Astrophysics

Senior Electrical Engineer / Electrical Systems Engineer

Thomas Gauron

tgauron@cfa.harvard.edu

About

Tom is a Senior Engineer and Electrical Group Leader in the CfA Central Engineering’s Electrical Group. He joined the CfA in 1987, coming from a small company specializing in the design and development of benchtop CNC machine tools for the vocational training and rapid prototyping market.. He has worked on many instruments for space flight and ground based facilities, including Chandra/HRC, Hectospec, MMIRS, Binospec, Parker Solar Probe/SWEAP Solar Probe Cup, and are currently working on Monolithic CMOS soft x-ray imaging detectors and engineering/operations support for the ongoing Chandra/HRC mission.

MSEE (Radar Systems) / BSEE (Power Systems) Tufts Graduate School / Tufts College of Engineering

Telescopes and Instruments

Magellan Telescopes

The twin Magellan Telescopes in Chile are each 6.5 meter optical telescopes. These telescopes are both equipped with instruments to take images and spectra of light from a wide variety of astronomical sources, including exoplanet systems, star-forming regions, supernova remnants, and interacting galaxies. The Magellan Telescopes — named Baade and Clay — are hosted at the Las Campanas Observatory and are operated by a consortium of institutions, including the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Carnegie Institution for Science, University of Arizona, the University of Michigan, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition, CfA scientists and engineers provided a wide field f/5 focal system (including secondary mirror and corrective optics), and a powerful astronomical camera for use at the Clay telescope.

Visit the Magellan Telescopes Website

Giant Magellan Telescope

Is Earth unique, or are there other planets with life in the Milky Way? To answer this question and many others, astronomers need larger and more sensitive observatories than anything we currently have. For that reason, the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is collaborating with a number of other institutions around the world to create the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), currently under construction in Chile. The GMT will consist of seven large mirrors acting in concert as one giant telescope 80 feet across. That large size provides an unprecedented view of the sky and the ability to detect the chemical composition of exoplanet atmospheres. Like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the GMT will be a powerful tool across the field of astronomy, providing insights into the formation of planets, the structure of galaxies, and the evolution of the universe itself.

Visit the GMT Website

Chandra

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is NASA’s flagship X-ray observatory, providing essential data on everything from the environment surrounding newborn stars to the emissions from hot plasma inside galaxy clusters. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), as part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, manages Chandra’s day-to-day operations, providing spacecraft control, observation planning, and data processing for astronomers. Chandra is one of NASA’s orbiting Great Observatories, along with the Hubble.

Visit the Chandra Website

MMT Observatory

The MMT Observatory is the premier visible-light and infrared telescope jointly managed by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and the University of Arizona. Located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) in southern Arizona, this 6.5-meter (21 foot) telescope is used to study objects across the field of astronomy, from the Solar System to distant galaxies. The MMT has provided a testbed for new telescope technologies developed by scientists and engineers at the CfA and the University of Arizona.

Visit the MMT Website

Lynx X-Ray Observatory

The Lynx X-ray Observatory is a proposed X-ray space telescope, designed to be the next generation following NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s upcoming Athena Telescope. This observatory will be able to take images of a larger area of the sky in X-ray light with better resolution than any existing telescope, allowing astronomers to study the first supermassive black holes, the hot gas surrounding galaxies as they evolve, and radiation from the earliest stars. Researchers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and other universities are presenting Lynx to NASA for consideration in the 2020 Decadal Survey, with a proposed launch date in the mid-2030s.

Visit the Lynx X-Ray Observatory Website

Parker Solar Probe

What is driving the solar wind? Some particles in the Sun’s atmosphere gain enough speed to escape the Sun’s gravitational pull and bombard the worlds of the Solar System, but the processes behind the phenomenon are still mysterious. To solve that mystery, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe spacecraft was built to fly through the Sun’s atmosphere, performing the first up-close solar measurements in history. Scientists and engineers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian built the Solar Probe Cup (SPC) instrument for the spacecraft. SPC is part of the Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) instrument suite used to sample particles directly from the Sun’s atmosphere for analysis.

Visit the Parker Solar Probe SWEAP Website

The Greenland Telescope

The polar regions are challenging environments for humans, but worthwhile for astronomy with their long nights and often-clear skies. The Greenland Telescope is the latest telescope to be placed in the Arctic, as part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project to capture the first images of black holes. The telescope operates in the region of the spectrum where infrared and radio light meet, which is ideal for looking into the dense central region of the Milky Way, where our galaxy’s supermassive black hole resides. The Greenland Telescope is jointly operated by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics (ASIAA) of Taiwan.

Visit the Greenland Telescope Website

High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C)

Why the Sun’s corona — the wispy outermost atmosphere — is so much hotter than its surface stands as a big mystery in solar science. NASA’s High-Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) is an ultraviolet telescope designed to help solve the mystery, and understand the processes by which the Sun sends violent storms of particles into the Solar System. Since most of the light from the Sun’s atmosphere is blocked by air molecules on Earth, Hi-C is carried on a short-flight rocket into Earth’s upper atmosphere. Since 2012, Hi-C has flown three times, providing the highest resolution images of the corona and revealing new details in the Sun’s atmosphere. Hi-C is jointly operated by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, with contributions from other researchers around the world.

Visit the Hi-C Website