India sets up first & Asia's largest Liquid-Mirror telescope in Uttarakhand's Devasthal

India has commissioned a one-of-a-kind liquid-mirror telescope atop a mountain in Uttarakhand's Himalayan range that will monitor the sky for transitory or variable objects such as supernovae, gravitational lenses, space debris, and asteroids. International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) is the country's first and largest liquid-mirror telescope, as well as the largest in Asia.

"Built by astronomers from India, Belgium and Canada, the novel instrument employs a 4-meter-diameter rotating mirror made up of a thin film of liquid mercury to collect and focus light. It is located at an altitude of 2450 metres at the Devasthal Observatory campus of Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), an autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India in Nainital district, Uttarakhand," Ministry of Science and Technology said in a statement.

Notably, scientists from these three countries spun a pool of mercury which is a reflective liquid, so that the surface curved into a parabolic shape which is ideal for focusing light, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology. It further states that a thin transparent film of mylar protects the mercury from the wind as the reflected light passes through a sophisticated multi-lens optical corrector that produces sharp images over a wide field of view. A large-format electronic camera is also located at the focus that records the images.

The telescope was designed and built by the Advanced Mechanical and Optical Systems (AMOS) Corporation and the Centre Spatial de Liège in Belgium.

'This project will attract and motivate several young minds': Prof Dipankar Banerjee

The Director of ARIES, Professor Dipankar Banerjee said that the ILMT project will attract and motivate young minds to take up challenging problems. "ILMT is the first liquid-mirror telescope designed exclusively for astronomical observations installed at the Devasthal Observatory of ARIES...I am hopeful that this project will attract and motivate several young minds from scientific and engineering backgrounds to take up challenging problems," Professor Banerjee said according to a press release from the Ministry of Science and Technology. He also stated that Devasthal Observatory now hosts two four-meter class telescopes – the ILMT and the Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT). Notably, both these telescopes are the largest aperture telescopes available in the country.

The ILMT collaboration includes researchers from ARIES in India, the University of Liège and the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Belgium, Poznan Observatory in Poland, the Ulugh Beg Astronomical Institute of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences and the National University of Uzbekistan in Uzbekistan, the University of British Columbia, Laval University, the University of Montreal, the University of Toronto, York University and the University of Victoria in Canada, according to the Ministry of Science and technology.