Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC)
2021 MAR 6
Preliminary >
Science and Technology > Space technology > Basics of space technology
Why in news?
- Indian scientists have indigenously designed and developed a low-cost optical spectrograph named as Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC).
About the spectrograph:
- The low-cost optical spectrograph that can locate 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.
- Such spectroscopes were so far imported from abroad involving high costs.
- The optical spectrograph is named as Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC).
- It was indigenously designed and developed by Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital.
- It can locate sources of light with a photon-rate as low as about 1 photon per second.
- 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.
- It uses a complex arrangement of several lenses made of special glasses that are polished to better than 5-nanometer smoothness to produce sharp images of the celestial sky.
- Photons coming from distant celestial sources, collected by the telescope, are sorted into different colours 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 minus 120 degrees Celsius.
- The spectrograph is presently being used by astronomers from India and abroad to study distant quasars and galaxies in a very young universe, regions around supermassive black-holes around the galaxies, cosmic explosions like supernovae and highly energetic gamma-ray bursts, young and massive stars, and faint dwarf galaxies.
Prelims Question
Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera is an observatory located in:
(a)Uttarakhand
(b)Himachal Pradesh
(c)Ladakh
(d)Arunachal Pradesh
Answer to the Prelims Question