India’s places its first robotic telescope in one of the world’s highest astronomical observatories

• As a part of the Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH) program, India now has its first robotic telescope.
• The telescope is capable of capturing dynamic and transient events overcoming the constraint of limited time periods.
  
• The partnerships encompassed in GROWTH allow the nations to observe the skies without any interruptions.

Though most stars look like stagnant dots in the sky, the reality is a lot more dynamic. Indian scientists will now be able to capture that dynamism with the country’s first robotic telescope. The fact that the telescope is robotic entails that it can, in most situations, operate without any human intervention.

And since it’s at the Indian Astronomical Observatory (IAO) at Hanle in Ladakh, the telescope also has the badge of being housed in the one of the world’s highest astronomical observatories at 4,500 meters.

People associated with the project explained that the telescope will provide data on many astronomical events of the universe are dynamic and transient in nature. This includes events related to gravitational waves, supernovae and gamma-ray bursts.

But, essentially, the telescope has the potential to capture any event that has an electromagnetic signature radiation as one of its results.

The telescope is also going to boost India’s capabilities for tracking asteroids. Sure, asteroids aren’t transient events but once they’re close to the Earth, there’s a very small window in which they can be observed. The apparatus, being capable of capturing dynamic events, would be able to make the relevant observations in the little time available.

The bigger picture

A part of the Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH) program, the telescope is a multinational collaboration with the US, the UK, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Israel. The telescope is only one piece of the puzzle, the larger objective of the project is the study of time-domain astronomy.

The collaboration plays a strategic role in allowing a continuous and interrupted record of the skies since the partner telescopes work in sync with India’s own ₹35 million ($513,535) telescope.

And, the telescope itself is programmed in such a way that it can communicate with other ground and space surveys that are also on the hunt for transient events in outer space.

(Representative image: Hanle Observatory)