Space photonics: A new era of space instrumentation

Recent developments in astrophotonics herald a new era for ground-based astronomy. These technologies are now being extended and adapted to space-borne instrumentation over the coming decade. One of the revolutionary developments is the photonic integrated multimode microspectrograph (PIMMS) that greatly reduces the size of any spectrograph, independent of the telescope aperture, the slit aperture or the spectroscopic resolution of the instrument. We now extend these ideas to space instrumentation where a much broader spectral range can be explored. We are focusing our efforts on the extremes of the UV to mid-infrared (0.15-15μm) window that is increasingly becoming more accessible to photonic technologies.