Profesor Asociado
Research group: Astrophysics and Galaxy Formation
Dr. Josep Manel Carrasco is a researcher involved in Gaia calibration of photometric and spectrophotometric data (CU5 group in DPAC). He studied physics at the Universitat de Barcelona and obtained his PhD in 2006 on the design and characterization of all photometric filters proposed to fly with Gaia in the first mission design. Thanks to this work, the definition of current characteristics of the Gaia spectrophotometric instrument (BP/RP) could be done.
Currently involved in the internal calibration BP/RP data (inside Gaia PhotPipe), modelling instrumental effects changing with time and position in the focal plane and defining a unique instrument to relate all observations.
Working on Gaia, Josep Manel has plenty experience in Linux environments, subVersion and Jira platforms and other softwares associated with the mission.
In addition to contributing to the calibration, Josep Manel also contributes in assesing the status of the satellite (as part of the Payload Experts group) and creating the catalog of Gaia in CU9 coordination unit in the different releases of Gaia data produced until now (DR1 in September 2016, DR2 in April 2018 and EDR3 in December 2020).
Gaia data has been widely used for new and exciting discoveries. Gaia overseeded the Hubble Space Telescope in terms of number of refereed publications per year among ESA's missions (more than 6000 until now).
Using information from Gaia observations, Josep Manel contributes to ground-based observations of the Gaia science alerts using the Joan Oró telescope from the Montsec Observatory, objects with sudden light changes detected by the satellite, to classify them as supernovae, microlenses, variable starts, etc.
Besides using the Joan Oró telescope, he has expertise in using larger telescopes (as the ones in 2.2 m at Calar Alto and Mercator and NOT at Roque de los Muchachos in Spain and 1.5 m at San Pedro Mártir in Mexico).
Dr Carrasco is also involved in PLATO (leading the working group WP-131-150 in charge of simulating Gaia stars as seen with PLATO), Small-JASMINE and Euclid missions.
In the last years he has been studying possible synergies between Gaia and Javalambre surveys. In particular, he analysed the white dwarf content in Gaia catalogues and in the JPLUS survey. He is also member of the classification working group in the J-PLUS community and is studying the metallicity determination with JPLUS passbands for open clusters (in the JOCS project environment).
He has been teacher at the University of Barcelona for 'Space-based astronomy' subject in the 'Astrophysics, particle physics and cosmology' master courses, 'Observational Astronomy', 'Differential equations and vectorial calculus', 'Algebra' and 'Fundamentals of laboratory' subjects in Physics degree. He also teaches the Sun, stellar evolution and exoplanets in the astronomy courses for 'Universitat de l'Experiència' offered to people older than 55 years. He has also supervised several master and degree thesis final works using Gaia and JPLUS data. He has also participated as member of the evaluation court for final degree thesis.
He is deeply involved in outreach, being one of the usual contacts of the UB astronomy department with many press, radio and television media when some news on astronomy is on the news. He has also offered many outreach talks and prepare different material to explain Gaia and astronomy to the general public, schools, institutes, astronomical agroupations, ... He maintains a project called Miralcel, aiming to make outreach of astronomy and sharing visual resources to better understand astronomy related news and explain space exploration.
He is the author of the book 'Cosmos: Una inmersión rápida', published by Tibidabo Editions in 2019.
Lecturer (2016) y agregate (2018) AQU accreditation.
Master thesis directed: Alicia Cubero (2019), Umut Burgaz (2015), José Luis Chica (2014)
Bibliografic metrics (source: ADS, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/public-libraries/wa2N1LyiTb-MUKf64CwePg):
91 technical reports: 88 Gaia, 2 Small-JASMINE, 1 PLATO