Astrosat ,India’s first space observatory

 

A fully assembled Astrosat, India’s first space observatory, is ready for intensive tests here before its launch 

The Indian Space Research Organisation(ISRO) said that the 1,650-kg spacecraft would orbit Earth equatorially at 650 km and study distant stars, galaxies, black holes and other cosmic objects.

The space-based observatory was built at the ISRO Satellite Centre in Sriharikota to operate for five years and will provide useful data for the country’s astronomy community.

It will put India in an elite orbit with the U.S., Europe, Russia and Japan.

ASTROSAT would be India’s first multiwavelength astronomy satellite. It will facilitate simultaneous observations of celestial bodies and cosmic sources in X-ray and UV spectral bands. The uniqueness of ASTROSAT lies in its wide spectral coverage extending over visible (3500-6000 Å), UV (1300-3000 Å), soft X and hard X ray regions (0.5-8 keV; 3-80 keV).

ASTROSAT carries four X-ray payloads, one UV telescope and a charge particle monitor.  Two of the payloads are in collaboration with Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and University of Leiscester (UoL), UK.

The instruments carried include:

1. Large-Area Xenon-filled Proportional Counters (LAXPC)

2. A Coded-mask Camera with Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride detector array (CZTI)

3. A Soft-Xray imaging telescope with multi-foil Wolter optics and CCD detector (SXT)

4. A Scanning X-ray Sky Monitor consisting of three one-dimensional coded mask cameras (SSM)

5. Two 40-cm dia Ultraviolet Telescopes for Visible, NUV and FUV coverage (UVIT)

6. A Charged particle monitor (CPM)