astronomy

Ooty Radio Telescope

Ooty Radio Telescope is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Ooty Radio Telescope rather than just read about it. In short: The Ooty Radio Telescope (ORT) is located in Muthorai near Ooty, in South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is part of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), which is funded by the Government of India through the Department of Atomic Energy.

Key takeaways

Ooty Radio Telescope belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Ooty Radio Telescope to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Ooty Radio Telescope from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Ooty Radio Telescope (ORT) is located in Muthorai near Ooty, in South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is part of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), which is funded by the Government of India through the Department of Atomic Energy. The radio telescope is a 530-metre (1,740 ft) long and 30-metre (98 ft) tall cylindrical parabolic antenna. It operates at a frequency of 326.5 MHz with a maximum bandwidth of 15 MHz at the front end.

Design

The Ooty Radio Telescope has been designed and fabricated with domestic Indian technological resources. The ORT was completed in 1970 and continues to be one of the most sensitive radio telescopes in the world. Observations made using this telescope have led to important discoveries and to explain various phenomena occurring in the Solar System and in other celestial bodies. The reflecting surface of the telescope is made of 1,100 thin stainless-steel wires running parallel to each other for the entire length of the cylinder and supported on 24 steerable parabolic frames. An array of 1,056 half-wave dipoles in front of a 90-degree corner reflector forms the primary feed of the telescope. It has an angular resolution of 2.3deg x 5.5sec(dec)'.

History The structure of the radio telescope was designed in July 1963. Muthorai village near Ooty was selected as the suitable location and the construction work began in 1965. The telescope was completed in 1970. Normal post-commissioning and calibration use began in 1971. The ORT was upgraded in 1992 by the addition of a phased array of 1,056 array of dipoles each followed by a GaAsFET low noise amplifier (LNA) and a four-bit PIN diode microstripline phase shifter behind each dipole. The new feed was installed along the focal line of the 530 m long and 30 m wide parabolic cylindrical reflector of the ORT. This new feed brought about an improvement in the sensitivity of the ORT by a factor greater than three compared to the previous feed. The high sensitivity of the feed system and the large collecting area of ORT has been exploited for the studies of astrophysical phenomena such as pulsars, solar wind, recombination lines, and protogalaxies. As of 2017, the ORT is undergoing a major upgrade to its receiver chain, which will result in a new system called the Ooty Wide Field Array (OWFA). The OWFA is designed to function as a 264-element interferometric array, and to provide a significantly larger instantaneous bandwidth as well as field-of-view compared to the legacy ORT receiver system. This upgrade will significantly enhance the ORT's capabilities for heliospheric studies. Additionally this upgrade is also expected to open other avenues of research particularly in the newly emerging areas of 21 cm (8.3 in) intensity mapping and studies of transient radio sources.

Features The large size of the telescope makes it highly sensitive. As an example, it is in principle capable of detecting signals from a 1 watt radio station located 10 million kilometres (6.2×10^6 mi) away in space. The telescope sits on a natural slope of 11°, which matches the latitude of the location. This gives the telescope an equatorial mount that allows tracking of celestial sources for up to ten hours in the east–west direction. In the north–south direction, the telescope operates as a phased-array and is steerable by varying the phase gradients The telescope can be operated in either total power or correlation mode. In each mode, 12 beams are formed; beam 1 is the southernmost beam and beam 12 is the northernmost. These 12-beam systems are useful in sky survey observations. Recently, the reflecting surface of the ORT has been refurbished. A new digital back-end has been built for the ORT by the colleagues at Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bangalore.

Observations The ORT has produced results on radio galaxies, quasars, supernovae and pulsars, One long-term program determined the angular structure of several hundred distant radio galaxies and quasars using the lunar occultation method. The application of this database to observational cosmology provided independent evidence against the steady state theory and supported the Big Bang model of the universe. The telescope is currently being used mainly to observe interplanetary scintillation, which may provide valuable information about the solar wind and magnetic storms that affect the near-Earth environment. Interplanetary scintillation observations provide a database to understand space weather changes and their predictability.

Analog correlator This is widely used for IPS observations.

Upgrade The upgraded telescope has been used for observing pulse nulling. The interferometer can be used at Channel 37 (608 MHz to 614 MHz, important radio astronomy frequencies) with lesser performance.

Ongoing projects IPS observations: The interplanetary scintillation (IPS) observations obtained from the Ooty Radio Telescope on a large number of radio sources provide the day-to-day changes of the solar wind speed and density turbulence in the inner heliosphere. Pulsar timing observations Spectral line observations

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Ooty Radio Telescope

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Ooty Radio Telescope claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Ooty Radio Telescope before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Ooty Radio Telescope ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Ooty Radio Telescope

In research: Ooty Radio Telescope appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Ooty Radio Telescope in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Ooty Radio Telescope is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1969 establishments in Tamil Nadu, 20th-century architecture in India, Astronomical observatories in Tamil Nadu, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Ooty Radio Telescope outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Ooty Radio Telescope in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Ooty Radio Telescope means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Ooty Radio Telescope out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Ooty Radio Telescope in simple terms?

Why does Ooty Radio Telescope matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Ooty Radio Telescope?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Ooty Radio Telescope.