India to contribute Rs800 crore in mega telescope project

New Delhi: Indian equipment and technology are set to play a major role in yet another path-breaking international astronomy project when it supplies equipment and technology worth around Rs800 crore for the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project. 

An international, $1.2 billion (Rs5,880 crore) initiative, the TMT will be the world's largest telescope and be located in Hawaii. The project is the brainchild of US and Canadian astrophysicists.

Department of Space and Technology (DST) officials confirmed that the Government of India would be partnering the project, after having joined as an observer last year. ''This upgrade will involve around Rs800 crore worth of technology as contribution from the Indian side,'' they said.

Involvement in the project would help Indian equipment manufacturers and also give the country's scientists access to the telescope being built atop Mauna Kea, one of the world's tallest mountains, he said.

The Thirty Metre Telescope is a highly controversial, proposed ground-based astronomical observatory with a proposed 30-metre (98-foot) diameter segmented mirror lens.

If built, the telescope would be capable of observations from the near-ultraviolet to the mid-infrared (0.31 to 28 µm). An adaptive optics system would correct for image blur caused by the atmosphere of the Earth. At wavelengths longer than 0.8 µm, this correction would enable observations with ten times the spatial resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.