Conor Sayres

About

Conor Sayres is a key architect of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey V (SDSS-V), an ambitious all-sky spectroscopic survey designed to decode the history of the Milky Way, explore stellar evolution, and track supermassive black holes. His primary contributions center on the design, metrology, and operations of SDSS-V’s robotic Focal Plane System (FPS)—a groundbreaking instrument enabling precise, multi-object spectroscopy. Sayres led the development of the FPS’s coordinate systems and transforms, ensuring sub-arcsecond positioning accuracy for over 6 million targets. His work on high-precision metrology and cyberinfrastructure has been foundational to the survey’s success, with his most-cited paper (23 citations) detailing the FPS architecture. By engineering the robotic systems that orchestrate thousands of simultaneous observations, Sayres has directly enabled SDSS-V’s transformative science—from unraveling the inner workings of stars to probing the origins of solar systems. His contributions exemplify the critical role of instrumentation in modern astrophysics, bridging cutting-edge robotics with frontier astronomical discovery.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   A robotic Focal Plane System (FPS) for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey V

   23 citations · 2020
2. 2
   Multi-object spectroscopic operations with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey V

   6 citations · 2020
3. 3
   SDSS-V robotic focal plane system: overview of coordinate systems and transforms

   5 citations · 2022
4. 4
   SDSS-V focal plane system high-precision metrology

   3 citations · 2022
5. 5
   The Sloan Digital Sky Survey cyberinfrastructure

   2 citations · 2022

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links