TMT: India joins the Ivy League of Astronomy
India will be manufacturing all the sensors, actuators and SSAs for the largest ground-based observatory – Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT), coming up on Mauna Kea Mountains of the Hawaiian island. One of the largest land based telescopes, TMT will have nine times the light-gathering power of today’s most advanced telescopes owing to its massive 30 meter mirror. Once operational, scientists across the globe are hopeful that TMT would serve as a critical general purpose telescope to help explore several unexplained mysteries haunting mankind like: the black holes at the centre of galaxies; birth and evolution of galaxies; birth, evolution, and death of stars and many more unsolved astronomical mysteries.
A mega international science project involving USA, Canada, Japan and China, it will put to test the ‘scientific’ and ‘precision engineering’ abilities of both Indian scientists and industries alike. Developing key hardware and software systems for the project; it is probably the first time that India has taken up such a technically demanding precision engineering astronomy project. The Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has agreed to jointly spend Rs. 1,300 crore on the project over a period of 10 years. To ensure synergistic manufacturing work, the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) is working towards setting-up a first-of-its-kind large optics manufacturing facility – India TMT Optics Fabricating Facility (ITOFF) at its campus in Hoskote, Bengaluru.
Larsen and Toubro (L&T) has been awarded the task of manufacturing 10 SSAs (i.e. Segment Support Assembly) on a turnkey basis, involving: procurement of raw materials to manufacturing, inspection, assembly… as per the prescribed requirement. A highly complex optomechanical sub-assembly, each SSA comprising of 492 mirror segments is aligned and phased to deliver very high quality imaging at the time of observations. These optomechanical sub-assemblies of 492 mirrors comprising 82 different types would eventually make-up for the 30-meter primary mirror, the heart of this telescope. Each of these mirrors will have sensors and actuators controlled through a complex alignment and phasing software capable of detecting even minute faults in alignment, thereby ensuring that the mirror segments stay phased.
-Dr Siddhivinayak Barve
Editor, ScienceNow Digital
