With an eye on getting the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), an ambitious next-generation telescope, operational by 2027, India is gearing up to start manufacturing complex mirror pieces and key subsystems for the project.
Once ready, the TMT will be the world’s largest ground-based telescope, stationed atop Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano in Hawaii.
It has been 15 years in the planning. According to a report in the Indian Express, India is one of the five member countries involved in the project and is playing a significant role, including contributing key instrumentation components.
The project website’s current timeline predicts that the telescope enclosure’s base structure will be completed in June 2020, the initial on-sky tests in 2025, and that it will achieve ‘first light’ in mid-2027.
India’s role
India joined the TMT consortium as a full member in February 2014. According to the Indian Express, Larsen & Toubro (L&T) has been awarded a contract to build the segment support assembly (SSA), a system of “are complex optomechanical sub-assemblies on which each hexagonal mirror of the 30-metre primary mirror, the heart of the telescope, is mounted”.
Notably, a first-of-its-kind large optics facility called the IndiaTMT Optics Fabricating Facility (ITOFF) is being constructed at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics campus in Hosakote, near Bengaluru.
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The telescope will integrate 492 mirror segments into a single light-gathering surface 30 metres wide. The SSAs will ensure that the mirrors remain aligned and accurate. L&T is expected to be able to manufacture 10 SSAs this year.
Of the 492 mirrors, India will be contributing 80, which will be placed “along the circumference of the primary mirror,” and “are among the toughest ones to manufacture”.
Eswar Reddy, the programme director of India-TMT, said, “L&T shall be responsible [for] the procurement of raw materials, manufacturing, inspection [and] assembly of the SSA components, as per the prescribed requirements. Initially, there will be a production qualification phase, and tests will be performed on the 10 manufactured SSAs.”
“On behalf of India-TMT, [the Indian Institute of Astrophysics] inked a contract with L&T on December 31, 2018, for manufacturing 100 SSAs. This contract has been placed with a total value of approximately Rs 60 crore,” Reddy told the Indian Express.
The Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) are jointly giving Rs 1,300 crore to the project, of which 70% is to be spent on developing hardware and software systems for the project. The total project cost is $1.4 billion, or just over Rs 10,000 crore.
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According to reports, only about 10% of the funds have been spent so far, to set up various centres and facilities to develop and test the subsystem prototypes.
“All sensors, actuators and SSAs for the whole telescope are being developed and manufactured in India, which will be put together in building the heart of TMT,” A.N. Ramaprakash, the associate programme director of India-TMT, told the Indian Express.
“Since it is for the first time that India is involved in such a technically demanding astronomy project, it is also an opportunity to put to test the abilities of Indian scientists and industries, alike. The skills developed for the project can have applications in a wide range of areas,” he added.