'Made in India' success story! Scientists develop low-cost optical spectrograph
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New Delhi, Mar 3: Indian Scientists have indigenously designed and developed a low-cost optical spectrograph that is capable of locating the 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. Initially, India imported similar spectroscopes from abroad, which involved high costs. The total cost of this instrument is nearly Rs. 4 Crore.
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The ‘Made in India’ optical spectrograph is named as Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC), that is indigenously designed and developed by the Aryabhatta Research Institute of observational sciences (ARIES) of Nainital, which is an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) of the Govt of India. The indigenous optical spectrograph is about 2.5 times less costly compared to the imported ones and can locate sources of light with a photon-rate of as low as about 1 photon per second.
The spectroscope is presently the largest of its kind among the existing astronomical spectrographs in the country. It has been successfully commissioned on the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT), the largest in the country and in Asia, near Nainital, in Uttarakhand. The instrument is being considered to be the backbone of the 3.6-m DOT for observations of extremely faint celestial sources. It uses a complex arrangement of several lenses made of special glasses, polished to better than 5-nm smoothness, in order to produce sharp images of the celestial sky.
Photons coming from distant celestial sources, collected by the telescope, are sorted into different colors by the spectrograph and are finally converted into electronic recordable signals using an in-house developed Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) camera, cooled to an extremely low temperature of -120 degrees Celcius.
Dr. Amitesh Omar, scientist at ARIES, led this project with a technical and scientific team, which together researched and developed various optical, mechanical, and electronics subsystems of the spectrograph and camera. Expertise from various national institutes, organizations, including the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and some micro-small-medium-enterprises, were involved to review and build parts of the instrument serving as an example of effective collaboration. Prof Dipankar Banerjee, Director, ARIES, said “The indigenous efforts to build complex instruments like ADFOSC in India is an important step to become ‘Aatmanirbhar’ in the field of astronomy & astrophysics.”