Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Devasthal Optical Telescope
Mains level: India's astronomical feats
Indian Scientists have indigenously designed and developed a low-cost optical spectrograph called Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT).
Devasthal Optical Telescope
- The ‘Made in India’ optical spectrograph is named as Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC).
- It is indigenously designed and developed by Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital.
- DOT locates sources of faint light from distant quasars and galaxies in a very young universe, regions around supermassive black-holes around the galaxies, and cosmic explosions.
- Such spectroscopes were so far imported from abroad involved high costs.
Try this PYQ:
Q.“Event Horizon” is related to:
(a) Telescope
(b) Black hole
(c) Solar glares
(d) None of the above
Special features
- It is about 2.5 times less costly compared to the imported ones and can locate sources of light with a photon-rate as low as about 1 photon per second.
- It has been successfully commissioned on the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT), the largest in the country and in Asia, near Nainital Uttarakhand.
- This instrument uses a complex arrangement of several lenses made of special glasses, polished to better than 5-nanometer smoothness to produce sharp images of the celestial sky.
- Photons coming from distant celestial sources, collected by the telescope, are sorted into different colours by the spectrograph and are finally converted into electronic recordable signals.
- It uses an in-house developed Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) camera cooled to an extremely low temperature of -120 0
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