On Thursday, 08 May 2025, at 17:00 in Hall A410, Prof. Peter Tuthill will give a lecture titled „Toliman Mission Profile“. Extraterrestrial search – Past, current and future plans”. Professor Peter Tuthill is an expert in astrophysical imaging; studying stars and their immediate environments with unprecedented resolution. After obtaining undergraduate degrees in physics at University of Queensland and the Australian National University, Peter moved to Cambridge University graduating with a PhD in 1995. For the next 5 years, he worked as a Research Astronomer at the University of California in Berkeley in a research group led by Nobel Laureate, Professor Charles Townes. Peter returned to Australia with the millennium, holding a number of Australian Research Council fellowships up to his present appointment as a Future Fellow. Peter works at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy – one of the largest astrophysics groups in the country – serving as director from 2010-2015. Tuthill is the director of the proposed TOLIMAN Space Telescope, funded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation to search for planets around Alpha Centauri AB by astrometry.

The TOLIMAN satellite will be launched in 2026 into a 550km altitude sun-synchronous low Earth orbit (LEO). This planned orbit will enable TOLIMAN to perform its observation mission over the course of 3 years, downlinking data back to The University of Sydney. The TOLIMAN telescope will be carried by a 16U CubeSat bus, designed and manufactured by EnduroSat to leverage the standardized CubeSat platform for ambitious low-cost science. EnduroSat is a leading provider of CubeSat platforms, providing software-defined satellites that offer unmatched performance and redundancy.

This event is co-organized and supported by EnduroSat as part of their overall support of the MSc Program “Aerospace engineering and communications”.