Commissioned at Devasthal in Uttarakhand, it'll help survey the sky making it possible to observe #galaxies & other astronomical sources just by staring at the strip of sky that passes overhead. It's the first liquid mirror telescope in India & the largest in Asia.
Built by astronomers from India, Belgium and Canada, the novel instrument employs a 4m diameter rotating mirror made up of a thin film of liquid mercury to collect and focus light. It’s at an altitude of 2,450m at
@ARIESNainital Devasthal observatory campus.
Scientists from the 3 countries spun a pool of mercury which is a reflective liquid, so that the surface curved into a parabolic shape which is ideal for focusing light. A thin transparent film of mylar protects the mercury from wind, says
@IndiaDST
The reflected light passes through a sophisticated multi-lens optical corrector that produces sharp images over a wide field of view. A large-format electronic camera located at the focus records the images.
@IndiaDST
quoted Prof Paul Hickson (University of British Columbia, Canada), an expert on liquid mirror technology, as having said: “rotation of Earth causes the images to drift across the camera, but this motion is compensated electronically by the camera. This mode of operation increases observing efficiency and makes the telescope particularly sensitive to faint and diffuse objects.”
“ILMT is the first liquid-mirror telescope designed exclusively for astronomical observations installed at their observatory,” said
@ARIESNainital
director Prof Dipankar Banerjee, adding the observatory now hosts 2 4m class telescopes – ILMT & Devasthal Optical Telescope.
Both are the largest aperture telescopes available in the country. Banerjee is enthusiastic about the application of #bigdata and #AI / #ML algorithms that will be implemented for classifying the objects observed with the ILMT.
Banerjee said: “I’m hopeful the project will attract and motivate several young minds from scientific and engineering backgrounds to take up challenging problems.” @IndiaDST said the wealth of data generated with the ILMT survey will be exemplary.
“In the future, young researchers will be working on different science progs utilising ILMT data,” said Kuntal Misra,
@ARIESNainital project investigator of ILMT.
“When regular science ops begin later this year, ILMT will produce about 10GB data every night, which will be quickly analysed to reveal variable & transient stellar sources,” said Brajesh Kumar, @ARIESNainital ILMT project scientist. 12/n Pic shows observations by ILMT.
The 3.6 metre Devasthal Optical Telescope, with the availability of sophisticated back-end instruments, will allow rapid follow-up observations of the newly-detected transient sources with the adjacent ILMT.
“Data collected from ILMT will be ideally suited to perform a deep photometric and astrometric variability survey over a period of typically 5yrs,” says project director Prof Jean Surdej (University of Liège, Belgium and University of Poznan, Poland).
ILMT collaboration includes researchers from @ARIESNainital, University of Liège & Royal Observatory of Belgium, Poznan Observatory in Poland, Ulugh Beg Astronomical Institute of Uzbek Academy of Sciences and Nat’l University of Uzbekistan, University of British Columbia, Laval University, University of Montreal, University of Toronto, York University & University of Victoria. Telescope was designed & built by Advanced Mechanical & Optical Systems (AMOS) Corpn and the Centre Spatial de Liège in Belgium.
