UNews - Ian Veenendaal

Novel U of L instrument design published in Review of Scientific Instruments

caroline.zentner — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 23:10:15 +0000

An innovative concept developed by the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Astronomical Instrumentation Group (AIG) was recently published in the prestigious Review of Scientific Instruments, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) now in its 90th year. Although published by the AIP, the Review of Scientific Instruments is unique in that it reports on novel instrumentation from all branches of science and, as a result, has a high acceptance threshold.

The paper, titled An angle-scanned cryogenic Fabry-Pérot interferometer for far-infrared astronomy, by Dr. Ian Veenendaal (BSc ’13, MSc ’16, PhD ’20) et al, presents a novel design for a Fabry-Pérot Interferometer (FPI). An FPI is a spectrometer that is able to obtain high-resolution spectral images of distant astronomical sources, allowing astrophysicists to look back in time to study the formation and evolution of galaxies.

Drs. David Naylor (right) and Ian Veenendaal collaborate in the AIG lab.

“Being published in the Review of Scientific Instruments speaks to the quality of Ian’s work in his doctoral thesis,” says Dr. David Naylor, Veenendaal’s supervisor and Tier 1 Board of Governors’ Research Chair in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. “This paper has already captured the interest of teams at the French national centre for scientific research and the Scripps Institute, demonstrating the broad potential of this new concept.”

Reviewers of the article highlighted the novelty of the instrument, which was tested in the AIG’s test facility cryostat to simulate the hostile environment that would be encountered in space.

Veenendaal developed his design with the Space Infrared Telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics (SPICA) mission in mind. The telescope is a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). SPICA is one of three candidates for ESA’s mission, with the final selection expected in 2021.

“Developing novel instrumentation is what we do in the AIG,” says Naylor. “There are numerous subject-specific instrumentation journals, but to be recommended as a feature article in the Review of Scientific Instruments speaks not only to the quality, but also to the breadth of interest in our work.”

Indeed, Veenendaal was offered a position in the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) a full year before he defended his thesis in recognition of his thesis work. He joined SRON in September 2019 and is currently leading the design of the Assembly Integration and Verification (AIV) effort for the SAFARI instrument on the SPICA mission.

“The experience I’ve gained from my PhD research has proven to be invaluable for my current position at SRON,” says Veenendaal. “The AIV of SAFARI involves a complex interplay of mechanical, electrical, optical, thermal and even logistical systems.”

U of L’s space imaging group scores success on two fronts

caroline.zentner — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 16:52:47 +0000

The ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Astronomical Instrumentation Group (AIG) is celebrating two recent victories, one technical and one personal.

From left to right are Dr. Ir. Willem Jellema, senior instrument scientist with SRON; Trevor Fulton, U of L software modeller; Dr. David Naylor, U of L physics professor; Carolien Feenstra, grad student at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Groningen; Ian Veenendaal, U of L doctoral student; Adam Christiansen, U of L grad student, and Rebecca Sirota, U of L electronics technician.

When Ian Veenendaal, a doctoral student studying under physics professor Dr. David Naylor, first started collaborating with the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) and Cardiff ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ on a Fabry-Pérot etalon (an instrument that measures the wavelengths of light) two years ago, he didn’t imagine it would one day lead to a job offer. As soon as he finishes his PhD thesis, which he expects will be sometime next summer, he’ll become an instrument scientist with SRON.

“It’s like a dream come true,” he says. “My goal since I started in physics was to work with some space agency and it came through.”

Veenendaal was collaborating with SRON on the design of the Fabry-Pérot etalon, which was designed, produced and tested by SRON before being brought to the U of L for testing in the cryogenic testing facility during the last week of November. The etalon had to be cooled to 4 Kelvin and then tested to see if it would operate in such cold temperatures. Turning an instrument on for the first time is called seeing first light and, in this case, the instrument performed exactly as it should.

“There’s nothing like it,” says Veenendaal. “When you see that first little spike in the signal that you expected to see, that your math and computer models tell you should be there, it’s confirmation that the hundreds of pieces of the puzzle fit together properly. There’s both a sense of accomplishment and relief.”

The etalon was accompanied by Dr. Ir. Willem Jellema, a senior instrument scientist and project lead with SRON and assistant professor at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Groningen. He was accompanied by Carolien Feenstra, a master’s student at the university, who started working on the project as an undergraduate.

“It’s the equivalent of a tuning fork, an optical tuning fork,” says Jellema. “The device we built filters out one specific colour of light and rejects all the other ones. That way, by tilting it, we can actually tune selected different colours of light and analyze them at very high fidelity.”

“It’s been a great week,” says Dr. David Naylor, a U of L physics professor. “There’s an army of talented people behind this. It’s been a fantastic collaboration, all funded on our part by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). It’s a really important first. No one has made this kind of etalon before.”

The etalon is roughly five centimetres in diameter and so precisely flat that, if it was expanded to the size of Henderson Lake, the surface from one end to the other would not deviate by more than half a centimetre.

“That was key to the success,” says Jellema. “We had to etch and polish multiple layers of essentially solar-panel material to perfection and there is actually no one who can easily do this. It’s state-of-the-art processing capability at SRON and the NOVA optical infrared group, and maybe even in the world. That’s the expertise we could bring into this project.”

Funding for the collaboration was provided by a CSA Flights and Fieldwork for the Advancement of Science and Technology (FAST) grant and through SPICA-Safari funding from SRON and a Leids Kerkhoven-Bosscha Fonds (LKBF) subsidy from the Leiden Observatory. A member of the FAST collaboration, Professor Peter Ade from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ, provided critical band limiting cryogenic filters.

The device has been a stepping stone to building an even better device that could very well be included in a NASA space mission in the future. It could also eventually fly in the SPICA mission as a calibration source component or as part of a high-altitude balloon project by CNES, the French space agency, above Australia and Canada.

Physics student awarded prestigious scholarship

caroline.zentner — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 15:21:54 +0000

Ian Veenendaal, a doctoral student in Dr. David Naylor’s astrophysics lab at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge, has always been curious about how things work. His quest to build a spectrometer that can operate at cryogenic temperatures has earned him an Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Worth $105,000 over three years, the scholarships are given to high-calibre doctoral students in the natural sciences or engineering to allow them to fully concentrate on their studies and seek out the best research mentors in their chosen field.

“I’m honoured that someone saw my work and thought it was worth funding,” he says. “It’s always nice to have confirmation that what you do is seen as important. It really speaks to the legacy of the Astronomical Instrumentation Group; they know what to expect from David Naylor’s students.”

Veenendaal was awarded the scholarship based on his proposed doctoral research to perform cryogenic testing on instruments being developed for SPICA (Space Infrared Telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics), which is expected to launch in the late 2020s. The scholarship will provide him with the flexibility to travel more, whether to present research results at conferences or to spend time working closely with technology companies like ABB that are also involved in the SPICA space project.

“Thank you to the committee for picking my research and I also have to thank the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ for putting my research forward,” he says.

Veenendaal grew up on a farm near Picture Butte and attended school in Lethbridge, graduating from Immanuel Christian High School. As a youngster, his curiosity about how things work meant he liked to take things apart and solve the mystery of their inner workings. At school he was interested in the sciences, especially chemistry and physics. He considered pursuing further studies in chemistry but physics eventually tipped the scales.

“As a physicist, I’m biased, but I say physics is the most fundamental of all the sciences. It really delves into things smaller than the atomic level, and looks at everything from the smallest things in the universe to the largest things. If you want to know how things work, physics is the way to go,” says Veenendaal.

He was also interested in engineering but the chance to be involved in research as an undergraduate, to get to know his professors and do hands-on work, pulled him toward attending the U of L.

“In my second year, I started working with David. That’s when Herschel had just been launched and they were collecting data from it and it needed to be analyzed. I spent a lot of time working for David over the summer and part-time during the semester, doing mostly software development for looking at Herschel/SPIRE data,” he says. “I had the experience in David’s group when I graduated and I knew I wanted to get more into the hands-on end of things. David asked me to do a master’s degree with him and I said ‘Yes, but I need to be working in the lab, not sitting in front of a computer.’”

After completing a BSc in 2013, Veenendaal started working on a master of science, focusing his research on designing and building low temperature systems like the cryogenic test facility now in use in Naylor’s lab. The day after he completed his MSc in January 2016, he started working on his PhD.

“David always says a space mission is the making of a career. If you start at the point when everything is starting to come together and can be part of the whole process, that opens up paths. As soon as I’m done my PhD, the European Space Agency and others are going to be looking for people who know what they’re doing with this project, and I’ll be in a good position,” he says.

Super cold deep freeze key to testing instruments destined for space

caroline.zentner — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 17:16:47 +0000

The ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s new cryogenic test facility (CTF) has allowed researchers in Dr. David Naylor’s astrophysics lab to be more productive, more energy efficient and more flexible.

“It’s working exactly as intended. It’s great,” says Naylor, a U of L physics and astronomy professor and Board of Governors Research Chair. “I do have to thank the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the province, and the manufacturer, Quantum Technologies.”

Ian Veenendaal, a graduate student, loads the chassis of a Fourier transform spectrometer into the new cryogenic test facility.

The CTF, which cost slightly more than $375,000, allows U of L scientists to test instruments to ensure they work in extreme cold before they are sent into space. Before the new CTF was installed, the U of L was capable of testing only smaller instruments in its fleet of cylindrical cryostats. Typically, individual components are tested in laboratories around the world before being integrated in a major space agency facility.

The new CTF can accommodate instruments about the size of a large toaster oven, enabling whole instruments to be tested at once. The CTF will help position the U of L for participation in future space astronomy missions. Naylor’s team has previously designed and built instrumentation that has gone into space so the CTF, along with U of L expertise, will expand the laboratory’s capacity.

“I would say that the CTF has increased our productivity by a factor of 10. It allows us far more flexibility and enables us to try different things out,” says Naylor. “It can achieve temperatures 10 times colder than the universe and it uses no liquid helium consumable.”

Instruments heading into space must be able to operate at 4 Kelvin (-269 C). Naylor’s group is currently testing a Fourier transform spectrometer (FTS), an instrument that measures the far infrared universe and the kind of instrument Naylor says is being considered for the next generation of space missions.

Ian Veenendaal, a graduate student, has been closely involved with the building and installation of the CTF and now with its operation.

“We will be delivering a report to the Canadian Space Agency at the end of the year and we are working to show that we are capable of building an FTS and operating it at 4 Kelvin,” says Veenendaal.

UNews - Ian Veenendaal

Novel U of L instrument design published in Review of Scientific Instruments

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