Astronomy & Space Technologies

CSIRO research in astronomy and space technologies includes space-based hardware and ground-based systems for spacecraft and satellites, and systems to interpret astronomical signals from space.

Astronomers have used a pair of pulsars orbiting each other, found with CSIRO’s Parkes telescope in 2003, to show that Einstein’s theory of general relativity is correct to within 0.05% – the most stringent limit to date.

Astronomers using CSIRO's Parkes telescope in eastern Australia have detected radio 'heartbeats' from a star that was not expected to have them. A US-Australian research team found that a 'magnetar' – a kind of star with the strongest magnetic fields known in the Universe – is giving off extraordinary radio pulses, which links this rare type of star with the much more common 'radio pulsars'.

In the 1990s, CSIRO built a ground-breaking instrument for its own Parkes radio telescope. Now it’s built one for the world’s largest telescope.

You want something impossibly smooth, round or flat? At the Australian Centre for Precision Optics we’ve been manufacturing with precision for more than fifty years.

A radio telescope’s ‘receivers’ capture the faint radio signals from objects in space, receiving specific frequencies and amplifying them up to a million-fold. Using expertise built up over decades, CSIRO creates world-class receivers for its own telescopes and others.

Learn about CSIRO's development of self-repairing autonomous space vehicles in this video from SCOPE, a science TV show for kids produced by Network Ten Australia and CSIRO. (3:00)

Star of the film ‘The Dish’, the Parkes radio telescope has been at the forefront of astronomy for over forty years. It has discovered more than two-thirds of the 1,700 known pulsars.

Dr Roger Netterfield, Senior Principal Research Scientist with the Australian Centre for Precision Optics, is a pioneer of optical thin films and is internationally renowned for developing narrow band Fabry Perot optical filters using air spaced interferometers and etalons.
 

This edition of The CSIRO Times covers CSIRO's physics-based research, some of which featured at the 17th Biennial Australian Institute of Physics Congress. (4 pages)