of the Giant Magellan Telescope. The current observatory director is Matthew Colless. The director's residence, destroyed in the 2003 fire, was rebuilt and opened to the public as a memorial in 2015. Research The MACHO project detected the first instance of the gravitational lensing of one star by another, known as gravitational microlensing, in 1993 (Alcock et al. 1993; Paczynski 1996). This discovery was made by repeated imaging of the Magellanic Clouds with the refurbished 50-inch Great Melbourne Telescope which was equipped with a mosaic of eight 2048 by 2048 pixel CCDs. The camera was constructed by the Centre for Particle Astrophysics in California (CFPA), and at the time was the largest digital camera ever built (Frame & Faulkner 2003). Observations began in July 1992 and the project concluded in December 1999. In total, the MACHO project made over 200 billion stellar measurements, with the data processed both at the observatory and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Brian Schmidt organised an international collaboration, known as the High-z Supernova Search Team, to study the rate of change of the Cosmic Expansion using type Ia supernovae. In 1998, the team reach the conclusion that the cosmic expansion was accelerating, contrary to expectations. This universal acceleration implies the existence of dark energy and was named the top science breakthrough of 1998 by Science magazine. In 2011, Brian P. Schmidt shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for such observations which provided evidence for the accelerating Universe. The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, co-led by Matthew Colless, undertook the largest galaxy redshift survey of its time, and was conducted at the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO) with the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope between 1997 and 11 April 2002. In total, the survey measured more than 245,000 galaxies, providing, along with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the definitive measurements of large scale structure in the low-redshift Universe. Advanced instrumentation The instrumentation group at Mount Stromlo Observatory has built two instruments for the Gemini Telescope. This includes the near infrared integral field spectrometer, NIFS, deployed on Gemini-North, and the adaptive optics imager for Gemini-South, GSAOI. NIFS, when nearly completed, was destroyed in the bushfires of 18 January 2003, and rebuilt. A new rapid survey telescope, SkyMapper, was completed in 2014. SkyMapper resides at the ANU's other observatory (Siding Spring) and can be operated remotely from Mount Stromlo. Mount Stromlo hosts a DORIS (geodesy) earth