Space and Astronomy Student Program: what is it about?
The Space and Astronomy student program aims to bring together students from around the World with CSIRO researchers who are experts in the use of the Australian radio telescopes. CSIRO is not a university and therefore cannot award honours, masters or PhD degrees. However, CSIRO researchers can co-supervise a student who is enrolled at a university. The student gains the experience of someone who is an expert with the Australian telescopes along with various benefits such as free site accommodation and some monetary support for travel for some degrees. The student also gets the ability to interact with a large number of students, take part in CSIRO colloquia and symposia, make use of the CSIRO computing facilities and much more. A complete list of benefits available are available here. In return for these benefits the student must undertake various duties such as acting as a duty astronomer at the Australia Telescope Compact Array telescope. The various requirements for membership of the student program are available here.
Details on how to join the program are available here.
This webpage describes the Space and Astronomy student program which is for students carrying out honours, masters or PhD degrees. See here for details of the Space and Astronomy summer vacation student program for undergraduate students and here for high school work experience students.
Some of the terminology may be confusing throughout these webpages. This program used to be called the "ATNF graduate student program". Our division in CSIRO is now called Space and Astronomy, but until May 2021 was CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science (CASS). We operate a number of world-class radio astronomy observatories that are collectively known as the Australia Telescope National Facility or ATNF. Our headquarters are in Marsfield, Sydney. Marsfield is close to Epping (which has the nearest train station) and so various webpages describe "visiting us in Epping" whereas other webpages describe "visiting us in Marsfield". Sorry for the confusion! We also have many of our astronomers and computing staff based at the CSIRO site at Kensington in Perth, Western Australia.