• What is IScAI?
• STUDENTS
• Programme
• Courses
• Courses syllabus
• Summary of Lecturers Curriculum Vitae
• Internships
• Evaluation
• Participation
• Schedule
• COMPANIES
• INSTITUTIONS
• IScAI 2010 Board of directors
• IScAI 2010 GALLERY

• What is IScAI?

The International School for Advanced Instrumentation (IScAI) is a major international initiative in higher education that aims to become a centre of excellence to learn expertise in all areas related to the construction of cutting-edge scientific instrumentation, with a particular emphasis on astronomical instrumentation.

The thrust of the IScAI is to educate the necessary workforce of specialized personnel in scientific instrumentation and facilitate the partnerships of universities, research institutes and high-tech companies in the construction of state-of-the-art instrumentation for the new generation of scientific facilities. The IScAI will also serve as a bridge between the intellectual resources and technology transfer capabilities of universities, research institutes and high-tech companies.

The IScAI is a multicenter collaborative effort among high-tech companies and research institutions. The School is open to astronomers, physicists and engineers world-wide.

The IScAI offers an intensive programme of courses and laboratory work in key areas related to the design and construction of scientific instrumentation. The laboratory work will be done at various research institutions and high-tech companies with world-class instrumentation programs in Europe and America.

To download the brochure of the IScAI-2010 click on this link

IScAI-2010 is funded by the Consolider-Ingenio 2010 grant “First Science with the GTC”, under the Consolider Ingenio 2010 Programme of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

• STUDENTS

The IScAi is open to astronomers, physicists and engineers world-wide.

The IScAI will offer the students:

1. A highly specialized curriculum of courses in frontline scientific instrumentation that will provide the necessary expertise to become Principal Investigators responsible for the construction of the future generation of instruments for ground-based and space observatories.


2. The possibility of carrying out laboratory internships, working with world-class instrumentation groups in research institutions and high-tech companies.


3. Tutors to supervise their progress in all activities of the School.


4. For students receiving travel financial support, help with the ticket reservation for travelling to  Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) and/or to the institution or company hosting the student during his/her internship.
   

• Programme

The programme consists of five weeks of intensive course work on five different subjects (optics, mechanics, electronics, software and management) related to the design and construction of astronomical instrumentation. These will be held at the headquarters of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in La Laguna, Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain). The students will have the opportunity to practice the subjects learned in the courses in a course project, remotely supervised.

Those students wishing to graduate from the IScAI 2010 will engage, for two and a half months, in a hands-on laboratory project to be done at a scientific institution or high-tech company assigned to each student. The assignment of the internships will be made by the IScAI Board of Directors considering the preferences expressed by the prospective students in the application form.

There exists the possibility of enrolling in one or more IScAI courses without graduating. Students following this option will not carry out the hand-on laboratory work.

• Courses

From 2010 June 14^th to July 16^th IScAI participants will be able to take up to five intensive courses, to be held at the IAC headquarters in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain). The registration fee is 300 € per course. Financial aid can be requested to the IScAI Board of Directors.

Those students wishing to graduate from the IScAI 2010 should attend and pass all of the following courses:

1. Optics (20 hours): Students will learn the basic concepts of optics and imaging, and the use of optical design/analysis software tools. The course will provide an overview of common astronomical optical systems, including telescopes, cameras, and spectrographs, and their common components (mirror, lenses, etc.). It will present a basic methodology for preliminary layout and analysis of astronomical instrument systems.
   Lecturer: Stephen S. Eikenberry
   Dates: 2010 June 14^th to June 18^th.
2. Mechanics (20 hours): Students will learn the basis of mechanical design, including analysis of precision designs for opto-mechanical and robotic systems, and other related disciplines, including materials, mechanical components, cryogenic systems, vacuum technology, structures and mechanical manufacturing processes. Mechanics course syllabus.
   Lecturer:Dario Mancini
   Dates: 2010 June 21^st to June 25^th.
   
3. Software (20 hours): Students will be familiarised with modern tools and the latest trends in software design. The aim is to guarantee the appropriate quality in software development. Software course syllabus.
   Lecturer: Nicolás Cardiel
   Dates: 2010 June 28^th to July 2^nd.
4. Electronics (20 hours): Students will learn the basis of electronic design, including instrument control software, astrophysics instrumentation requirements and detectors. Electronics course syllabus.
   Lecturer: José Javier Díaz
   Dates: 2010 July 5^th to July 9^th.
5. Management (16 hours): Students will learn to describe projects in terms of work packages, to establish a schedule with milestones and deadlines, to control budget and cash flow and to discuss requirements and specifications with both the scientists and the engineers to make them understand the project. Management course syllabus.
   Lecturer: Marisa García Vargas
   Dates: 2010 July 12^th to July 16^th.
   

• Courses Syllabus

1. Optics
2. Mechanics
3. Electronics
4. Software
5. Management

1. Optics course syllabus:

This outline of the course may be subject to change. The final program will be published in March 2010

1. Images and conjugates, ray traces, focal lengths, f/s, invariants
2. Mirrors, spherical mirrors, aberrations, conic mirrors
3. Telescopes
4. Lenses, Snell's law, thin lens, thick lens, aberrations (incl. chromatic)
5. Compound lenses, achromats, apochromats
6. Cameras: direct imagers, focal reducers, re-imagers; Infrared cameras: IR materials, cold stops and cryogenics, reflective systems
7. Cameras (cont.); Spectrographs
8. Spectrographs (cont.)
9. How to design an astronomical camera
10. How to design an astronomical spectrograph

2. Mechanics course syllabus:

• Telescopes and Instruments review: the role of mechanics and system engineering in multidisciplinary projects
• Telescope design vs instrument design and vice-versa
• The driving roles of Optics and Mechanics
• Meaning of Integrated System Design and Modelling.
• CAD course, 2D design examples and exercises.
  

• Design accuracy vs focal plane
• Error Budget and its management along the project
• Interfaces
• Computer Aided Design.
• CAD course, 3D design examples and exercises.

• Environment constraints vs system behaviour and vice-versa
• CAD, FEA, Integrated Design & Integrated Modelling
• Materials
• Static and Dynamic Analysis
• Practical activities

• Interaction between prototyping phases and project plan
• Cryogenic systems and vacuum technologies
• The final review of the project before manufacturing
• Practical activities

• The manufacturing phases
• System Integration feedback and refinements
• System tests, set-up and start-up
• The fast track methodology
• Practical activities

3. Electronics course syllabus:
This outline of the course may be subject to change. The final program will be published in March 2010

1. Basics
2. Electronic Laboratory Equipment and measurement techniques
3. CAD Tools
4. Electronics in Astrophysics Instrumentation. Functional blocks. Requirements and Guidelines
5. AO System
6. Imaging Detectors
7. Detector Test

4. Software course syllabus:
This outline of the course may be subject to change. The final program will be published in March 2010

PART I: Overview of the course

Understanding the problem

Outline of the course

PART II: Software development

Causes of development problems

Software best practices

The Rational Unified Process: Overview

The RUP: Process Description

The RUP: Dynamic Structure

PART III: Object Oriented Programming

Introduction to Objects

C++ Tutorial (I): Basics

C++ Tutorial (II): Functions and related topics

C++ Tutorial (III): Arrays and Pointers

C++ Tutorial (IV): Classes

PART IV: Essential programming tools

Using Makefiles

Debugging the code with GDB

Documenting the code with Doxygen

Control version with Subversion

PART V: The Unified Modeling Language

Introduction of UML

Practicing UML with Umbrello

PART VI: Data reduction pipelines

Objective of data reduction pipelines

Error handling

The GTC Data Processing Kit

PART VII: The practical Work

Description of the project

5. Management course syllabus:
This outline of the course may be subject to change. The final program will be published in March 2010

• Module 1: The academic point of view of Project Management
  • 1.1.- Project Establishment
  • 1.2.- Project Context
  • 1.3.- The scope
  • 1.4.- Project schedule. Time management
  • 1.5.- Project Budget
  • 1.6.- People as essential elements in Project Management
  • 1.7.- Project Plan
  • 1.8.- Project Documentation
  • 1.9.- The Instrumentation Management
  • 1.10.- Annex 1: System Engineering Introduction
• Module 2: The human view. Leadership. People significance
  • 2.1.- The emotional intelligence applied to Project Management: the resonant leadership
  • 2.2.- The ethic values applied to leadership and Team Effort
• Module 3: The Business View. Customers and Contractors.
  • 3.1.- Customer and contractor: different interests but a common goal
  • 3.2.- Purchase and acquisition management: products or services
  • 3.3.- Call for Tenders: Phase 1. Since the preparation to the announcement
  • 3.4.- Call for Tenders: Phase 2. Since the announcement to the award
  • 3.5.- Call for Tenders: Phase 3. Since the award to the contract's sign
  • 3.6. How to prepare a bid in answer to the Call for Tenders (or to an Announcement of Opportunity?
  • 3.7. Contractual relationships customer-contractor during a project execution
  • 3.8.- Annex 2: The Negotiation

• Summary of Lecturers Curriculum Vitae

Stephen Eikenberry is currently the Colonel Allan R. and Margaret G. Crow Term Professor of Astronomy at UF. He completed his PhD in Astronomy at Harvard University in 1997 under Dr. Giovanni Fazio, and from there moved to the Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship in Physics at Caltech. He moved next to an Assistant Professorship (1998) and then tenured Associate Professorship (2002) in Astronomy at Cornell University, where he also won an NSF CAREER award in 2000. In 2003, he left Cornell to become a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Florida. Eikenberry has designed and built a number of infrared and optical instruments for astronomical telescopes, including serving as Principal Investigator for the FLAMINGOS-2 near-infrared imager/spectrograph for Gemini Observatory and the Wide-field InfraRed Camera for Palomar Observatory.

Dario Mancini got is degree as Electric Engineer in 1984. Up to 1990 he was associate professor of advanced robotics, electronics, power electronics, mechanics and fluidodynamics at the Federico II University of Naples. He became astronomer in 1987, associate astronomer in 1994 and full astronomer in 2000. Along his career he fully designed, built and was in charge of several telescopes and instruments as TNG (Telescopio Nazionale Galileo), VIMOS (VIsual Multi Object Spectrograph), VST (VLT SUrvey Telescope), or TT#1 (1.6m altaz robotic telescope). He worked in the field of space applications and recently designed moon self deployable autonomous telescopes for the study of the solar system and of the Universe in the In Situ Sensing Program (ASI). He designed and built advanced control and drive systems for Antarctica. He is currently the Director of the Castelgrande Astronomical Observatory. He combined his activities with his research work in the field of fast optical photometry, exoplanet search, deep field imaging and asteroid mapping.

Nicolás Cardiel López is currently the Astrophysics Department Chair at UCM. He started to get involved in software development during his PhD Thesis Project, when he created a data reduction package called Reduceme, specially tuned for spectroscopic observations. That package incorporated the novelty of using a parallel treatment of data and errors throughout the whole data reduction. Since then, he has always been involved in the development of astronomical software, most of which is publicly available. More recently, he is leading the development of the data processing pipelines of EMIR and FRIDA, two future instruments for GTC. He has combined this software development with his research work in the study of stellar population in galaxies. For several years he worked as a resident astronomer at the Calar Alto Observatory.

José Javier Díaz García received a B.Sc. in Physics (Electronics) from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Madrid, Spain, in 1989. He joined ENTEL and participated in the development of an automatic system to control the availability of resources for Telefónica Spain. He works at the IAC since 1990 and has participated in the development of many different instruments for astronomy. He has also collaborated with the Physiology Department of the University of La Laguna in a project of sensorial substitution for the blind people. His research interest is currently focused in detectors, adaptive optics, electronic systems, integration and control applied to astrophysics instrumentation. He is also involved in project management of instrumentation programmes.

María Luisa García Vargas got the phD in Astrophysics in 1991 at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. During 8 years she had different researching and teaching positions at UAM. At that time, she carried out the integration and commissioning of a 0.5m telescope and its instrumentation, at UAM observatory, to be used for teaching purposes. From 1991 to 1994 she had the responsibility of the teaching direction and the development of several experiments and instrumental projects. After that, she took a position at ESAC (Villafranca del Castillo, Madrid) as Resident Astronomer to work in the scientific operation of the spatial telescope International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) of ESA.
In April 1997, she moved to Tenerife to work in GRANTECAN as Head of the Instrumentation Group of the GTC Project Office. She was the project manager of the in-house projects (Elmer instrument, focal plane arrays and data acquisition systems).
In April 2006, she funded FRACTAL SLNE, a private company specialized in consultancy, training and services for scientific projects and specifically for astronomical Instrumentation and software. She is the General Manager of the company and combines this task with her research activity in Astrophysics.

• Internships

Students wishing to graduate from the IScAI 2010  will engage, from 2010 September 27^th to December 10^th, in a hands-on laboratory project to be done at the laboratories of a partner company or scientific institution in Europe or America, carrying out a technical project in collaboration with their experienced instrumentation teams. High-tech companies or scientific institutions hosting  IScAI students will provide all required laboratory equipment and assign tutors who will supervise the progress of the students during their internship.

Internships will be assigned to each student by the IScAI Board of Directors, considering the preferences expressed by prospective students in the application form.

The areas for instrumentation projects offered for IScAI 2010 include:

- Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) – La Laguna, S/C de Tenerife, Spain:

1. Using a SIDECAR ASIC for the control of detectors from the Teledyne Hawaii-2 array family

- University of Florida (UF) – Gainesville, Florida, USA:

1. ZoDIACS Hardware Design

- Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) – Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid, Spain:

1. Optical bench tests and calibration of components for the MEGARA instrument for GTC

- Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)– México D.F. / Ensenada, Mexico:

1.  Electro-wetting lenses appplications for Adaptive optics systems
2.  ALBatros (Alignment Bench) Upgrading
3.  Gravitational & Alignment Effects on Optical Performance of the Wide-Field SASIR Telescope

- Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE) – Tonantzintla, Puebla, Mexico:

1. Automatizing a portable Fourier transform spectrometer to measure the transmission spectrum of the atmosphere above the Large Millimeter Telescope at millimeter and far-IR wavelengths

2. Characterization of photomultiplier tubes for the High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory

- Centro de AstroBiología (CAB) – Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, Spain:

1.  Instrument MIXS for the Bepi Colombo mission (Mercury)
2.  Instrument REMS for the MSL mission (Mars)
3.  Instrument Raman-LIBS for the ExoMars mission (Mars)
4.  Simulation chambers for planetary environments
5.  SOLID Experiment: detection of bio-markers in planetary environments

- Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial (INTA) Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, Spain:

- Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) - La Palma, S/C de Tenerife, Spain:

1.  Pipelines development
2.  PF Corrector(mechanical and/or optical design work)
3.  HARPS fibre positioner
4.  MOS instrument definition/science case

- GMV – Tres Cantos, Madrid, Spain:

1. Software tools for scientific data management
2. Development of algorithms for treatment/segmentation of medical images

- NTE-SENER – Lliçà d'Amunt, Barcelona, Spain:

1. Integration and Validation of a High-performance Hexapod

- LIDAX – Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, Spain:

1. Mercury Imaging X-Ray Spectrometer Focal Plane Assembly Qualification Campaign
2. Making Satellite Formation Flying Possible: telemetry optical sensor test campaign

- FRACTAL SLNE (in colaboration with UCM)– Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid, Spain:

1.  TBD

- EADS Astrium Crisa – Tres Cantos, Madrid, Spain:

1. Effectivity of modulation techniques to the synchronization clock of instrument switching power supplies for reduction of electromagnetic radiated and conducted noise

- IDOM - Bilbao, Spain:

1. Design and Fabrication of GTC Folded Cassegrain Sets
   

• Evaluation

Student's performance will be evaluated during the class work , during the course project and during the internship.

A student must successfully complete the course work before starting the internship. Evaluation of the course work will be done by each professor through individual homework exercises, laboratory practices and, at the end of the classes, the course project.

Evaluation of the lab work carried out during the internship will be done by the IScAI Board of Directors after:

1. the examination of the written report prepared by the students summarizing their laboratory work, and
2. listening to their oral presentation of this laboratory work.

Students will have to submit the written report to the IScAI Administrative Manager before 2010 December 10^th.

Final evaluation of the overall performance of the student in all activities of the IScAI will be done by the IScAI Board of Directors.

• Participation

Those students interested in attending the IScAI have the following participation options:

1. Registered students wishing to graduate from the IScAI 2010: they will attend the lectures at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) during the whole course work period of the IScAI (from 2010 June 14^th to July 16^th), and will work at one of the IScAI partner companies or institutions during their internship. Interested students must fill in the application form and upload the required documents before 2010 March 1^st.
2. Registered students not graduating from the IScAI 2010: they will attend the lectures at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) of those IScAI 2010 courses in which they wish to register. Please, note the dates of each of the courses in the IScAI schedule. Interested students must fill in the application form and upload the required documents before 2010 March 1^st.


3. On-line registered students wishing to graduate from the IScAI 2010: they will attend on-line to the lectures by means of the e-learning tools offered by the IScAI 2010 Distance Learning  Programme. During the internship period they will work in a nearby high-tech company or research institute collaborating with the IScAI. On-line registered students whose residency is far from any of the centres offering lab projects may, optionally, negotiate and propose to the IScAI 2010 Director an internship project in a nearby research institution/company. Interested students must fill in the application form and upload the required documents before 2010 March 1^st.
4. On-line registered students not graduating from the IScAI 2010: they will attend on-line the lectures of those IScAI 2010 courses in which they have registered. They will follow the lectures through the e-learning tools offered by the IScAI 2010 Distance Learning  Programme. Interested students must fill in the application form and upload the required documents before 2010 March 1^st.

All students will receive a certificate with the title, number of hours and final grades of the courses attended.

By 2010 March 8^th we will contact the applicants in order to:

1. Notify all students the decision by the Board of Directors regarding their applications.
2. Inform accepted students about the financial aid that they have been awarded and, if it is the case, the laboratory project that they have been assigned.
3. Request a letter from accepted students confirming their participation in the IScAI
   

• Schedule

In addition to the course work, various complementary activities will take place, including monographic conferences by invited speakers and a visit to the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC).

• COMPANIES

Companies and IScAI:

The IScAI is open to world-wide high-tech companies with expertise in cutting-edge scientific instrumentation interested in participating in 2010 edition.

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the development of instrumentation for the new generation of large ground-based observatories. In the early 1990's, the budgets for “large instruments” were typically in the range of 1M€ and small teams at the universities carried out their construction. By now, the current generation of instruments under construction or being planned for major observatories have budgets ranging from 20M€ to 70M€ – an increase of nearly 2 orders of magnitude in just over a decade.

The instruments for the future generation of extremely large ground-based telescopes and space observatories will be even more complex and expensive. Likewise, the size and composition of the teams required to construct such instruments has changed dramatically, involving dozens of scientists and engineers from academic institutions and high-tech companies around the world.

Participating companies in the IScAI will benefit from:

1. the opportunity to train a highly specialized work-force in tune with their needs and areas of expertise


2. a preferred access to partnerships with scientific institutions for building the next generation of scientific instrumentation.

As a partner, a company is expected, first, to propose an internship project, and second, to host IScAI students during their internship to work in its laboratories carrying out the proposed project within an experienced technical team.

Participating companies and companies will need to provide some information:

1. A self-contained, well-defined and well-planned instrumentation project that can be completed during the two months and a half internship.


2. A proposal for a set of deliverables to be submitted by the students at the end of their internship, in order to evaluate their performance.

The participating institutions must also guarantee:

1. A tutor who will supervise the progress of the students during their internship.
2. All laboratory equipment required for completing successfully the internship.

If you would like to learn more about how your company can become a partner in the IScAI 2010 or you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Mercedes Franqueira, the IScAI manager (at mmf[at]iac[dot]es), or the executive director of the IScAI 10, José Miguel Rodríguez Espinosa, (at jre[at]iac[dot]es), address: Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, C/ Vía Láctea s/n, E-38205 La Laguna, Spain.

Current partner companies in the IScAI 2010:

	FRACTAL is a brand-new company with a very high expertise in instrumentation. Fractal people have been several years working in the GTC project, covering all the instrumentation aspects. Fractal personnel were in charge of most of the work on ELMER, an instrument for GTC. Fractal is focused now in very specialized courses about all aspects of instrumentation.
	GMV is a privately owned technological business group with an international presence. Founded in 1984, GMV offers its solutions, services and products in very diverse sectors: Aeronautics, Banking and Finances, Space, Defense, Health, Security, Transportation, Telecommunications, and Information Technology for Public Administration and large corporations. GMV was the only company collaborating in the IScAI Pilot Program in 2008.
	LIDAX is a spanish SME that offers a response to the needs its clients may have when developing Advanced Mechanical Equipment. This equipment can be either a part of Functional On-board Subsystems for aircrafts or satellites or a part of cutting-edge scientific instrumentation.
	NTE-SENER provides engineering services for the development of custom, high-performance systems, instruments and equipment for advanced research and applications. The original focus on solutions for the Life Sciences and Biomedical sectors has evolved to cover niches in other scientific domains as well. Nowadays, NTE's activities address the needs of research centers, technological institutes, healthcare organizations and industrial companies which require high added-value engineering partnerships and solutions.
	EADS Astrium CRISA (Computadoras, Redes e Ingeniería , S.A.) is a Spanish company founded in 1985 to design and manufacture electronic equipment and software for space applications: satellites, launchers, orbital infrastructure and space transportation vehicles. Other activities include engineering projects for ground stations, defence and audiovisual sectors.
	IDOM is one of the leading companies in the Spanish market for professional services in Engineering, Architecture and Consulting and, at present, is taking the necessary steps to extend that leading position into the international arena.

• INSTITUTIONS

Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING, Spain). The ING operates the 4.2 metre William Herschel Telescope (WHT), the 2.5 metre Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and the 1.0 metre Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT) on behalf of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) of the Netherlands, and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Spain. The ING is located at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain.

• IScAI 2010 Board of Directors

Dr. José Miguel Rodríguez Espinosa (IAC) – Executive Director