The first phase of the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), the world's largest radio telescope facility operating at low frequencies, was inaugurated by Govind Swaroop, considered father of Indian radio astronomy, at Khodad village near Narayangaon in Pune district on Sunday.
Out of the 30 antennas, eight have been upgraded as per the latest technology in the first phase of the total upgrade process undertaken by the GMRT.
"The GMRT is one of the best telescopes in the world. The new upgrade is definitely a big step and going to help the scientists to do further research in various projects which were earlier impossible due to the limitation of the telescope," said Swaroop.
"There are 30 fully steerable, 45-metre diameter antennas, spread out over a 30-km region. After the upgrade, the efficiency of the 8 antennas has increased three times. The front end, back end, correlator, image processing, signal processing, servo drives and monitor and control are the core systems of the antenna and they have all been upgraded," said J S Solanki, Administrative Officer at National Centre for Radio Astrophysics. "All the upgrade of technologies has been done by our in-house scientists. Now it has a wider range, better resolution and decreased interference due to better filters. Hence, both Indian and international scientists will benefit a lot from this," he added.
Since the existing back-end electronics caters to only a narrow bandwidth of 32 MHz, a new backend system that can handle broad band signals is needed. according to a release issued by NCRA, such a new backend system is being developed by its engineers and scientists in collaboration with nVidia-India, US-based CASPER group and Swinburne University of Australia, useing the latest and best technologies in digital electronics and computer engineering to achieve a ten-fold increase in the bandwidth of the receivers (to 400MHz).
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