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Published by the Press, Information & Culture Wing, Embassy of India |
In this Issue Opinion: Kerala: Asia's Cradle of Christianity Feature: Interview with ISRO Chairman
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WORLD'S GIANT RADIO TELESCOPE TO BE COMMISSIONED The world's most powerful meter wave radio telescope at Khodad near Pune is expected to become fully operational by the end of this year. This was disclosed by Prof. Pramesh Rao, acting Chief of the National Center for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) to media persons from Delhi, who visited the site last Saturday. Prof. Rao said that final touches are being given and acceptance tests are underway. The corrector system for combining the signals from all the thirty GMRT antennas, one of the most complex digital hardware fabrications is already over and put into operation. The synthesizing of images with full array has also begun. The Giant Meter wave Radio Telescope (GMRT), a pet project
of NCRA, is an array of thirty fully steerable, prime focus parabolic antennas, each 45
metros in diameter. Twelve of these are located in a compact central array, about 1km x
1km in size. The remaining 18 antennas are placed along the three arms of an approximately
Y-shaped configuration with each arm extending to about 14 km from the array center. There
are six operating frequency bands centered at 50, 153, 233, 327, 610 and 1420 MHz. Dual
polarization operation is supported at all these bands. Dual frequency operations will be
possible with some combinations of the bands. LO, telemetry and IF signals are transported
to and from the antennas using fibber optic links. The main digital back-ends are a FX
correlator and a pulsar receiver. |