PhD Student (R1)

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, was a founding and hosting member of the former European HPC infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and is now hosting entity for EuroHPC JU, the Joint Undertaking that leads large-scale investments and HPC provision in Europe. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof, and currently has over 800 staff from 55 countries.

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We are particularly interested for this role in the strengths and lived experiences of women and underrepresented groups to help us avoid perpetuating biases and oversights in science and IT research.

The study of transient phenomena (e.g., supernova), so-called time-domain astronomy, is currently addressed by realizing full surveys of the sky (e.g., Pan-STARRS, SkyMapper, CRTS). The main challenge is to define the proper cadence, i.e., when and where to look in the sky to catch new events early and so observe as much of the phenomena as possible. The upcoming commissioning of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will allow to cover the entire available sky over a few nights. While observing from the ground provides great levels of sensitivity, it may involve complications like weather at the observing site or a particular region of the sky, hence limiting the possibility of evenly sampling all regions of the accessible sky.

The PErsistent All-sky Survey from Space (PEASS) project will mitigate such issues considering small scale in orbit telescopes to complete a survey of the sky in the optical wavelengths at high cadence. The concept relies on the ability to deploy a small constellation of nano-satellites equipped with a high sensitivity COTS camera and a compact refracting telescope to perform wide field imaging of patches of the observable sky. Subpercent level photometric accuracy on each image using such apparatus have already been demonstrated for detecting exoplanets in project Panoptes. PEASS will further mitigate the limited pointing stability of a nanosatellite to enable long enough exposures and maximize sensitivity by integrating energy efficient processing units within the nanosatellite. Furthermore, to accomplish the main goal of searching for rare and weak signals at the detectability limit, the data produced at high cadence (typically one image every minute maximizing single exposure time) has to be processed on-board (overlapping several unit fields of view to minimize false alarms) and compressed to deliver science products that can be sent to the ground stations for further analysis and exploitation.

The PEASS project is a collaboration between the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), with wide expertise in computing systems, and the Observatoire de Paris (OdP), with wide expertise in the astronomy domain. The project is envisioned as a PhD thesis, and will count on the cooperation of advisors from BSC, OdP and the European Space Agency (ESA).