India's Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope is on track to get a major upgrade by 2018

The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope ( GMRT ), located about ten kilometers east of Narayangaon on the Pune-Nasik highway (NH50) is getting a major upgrade. The GMRT is the world’s largest radio telescope array in the metrewavelengths range. The upgrades will allow the GMRT to have capabilities unmatched till the proposed Square Kilometre Array (SKA) becomes operational by 2023, according to a report in The Indian Express .

Yashwant Gupta, dean of the GMRT observatory said “About 75-80 per cent of the upgradation of the existing electronics and systems of the GMRT has been completed. Some of the new systems have already been put into operations for undertaking research and the first science results have started coming in.”

GMRT is an indigenous project. A novel approach of using stainless steel wire ropes instead of a conventional back up structure was used to make the antenna both low cost and low weight. In satellite imagery, the wispy dishes are almost invisible. There are thirty dishes in the array. Fourteen are dispersed randomly over a one square kilometer area, known as the “central array”. The remaining sixteen are distributed in a “Y” shaped configuration over an area of twenty five square kilometers. The resulting observations have the resolution of a single gigantic dish with a twenty five kilometer diameter.

The observations from the GMRT are used by astronomers and researchers all around the world. The instrument is in demand around the clock, and the operators have managed to juggle the upgrades so that the telescope can switch seamlessly between old and new systems and continue to make observations during the upgradation process.

The GMRT was the last Earth-based station to track the Schiaparelli lander by the European Space Agency, before it crashed into Mars. The GMRT along with NASA’s Chandra X-Ray telescope together were responsible for the discovery of a natural particle accelerator in deep space .