A feeling of being suspended in timelessness came over me as I formally lent India’s partnership to the international Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project on December 2 at India Habitat Centre. The great, 1st Century Greek thinker Apollonius Tyanaeus had remarked about our forefathers: In India I encountered a race of mortals living upon the earth but not adhering to it; inhabiting cities but not being fixed to them; possessing everything but possessed of nothing. Therefore, our people’s collective commitment to the truth that lies beyond the stars is ageless. Within five months of coming to power, our government, led by Shri Narendra Modi, pledged $ 212 million for building what is billed as the most significant and sophisticated telescope conceived yet for observing astronomical phenomenon. It is coming up over a mountain in Hawaii and may take up to 10 years to build and commission. Thus, we have been recognised as one of the five top world space powers – equity with the United States, China, Japan and Canada. TMT is many things—too extensive and exhaustive to recount here. In brief, is designed for observations from near-ultraviolet to mid-infrared (0.31 to 28 um wavelengths). It will be fitted out with adaptive optics systems which will help correct image blurs caused by the atmosphere of the Earth, therefore helping us get sharper pictures of celestial objects. It will use arrays of small 1.44 m hexagonal mirrors, a completely revolutionary design. What will be the purpose of this huge telescope placed on the highest altitude ever by pursuers of knowledge of the stars? Well, in lay terms, some of the easily-understood objectives are: 1. Our physicists, along with colleagues from the other partner countries, would be able to study and research on Dark Energy and Dark Matter. These are energy forms which make up most of the Universe and are yet to be understood. So knowledge in Dark Energy and Dark Matter will give a competitive edge to Indian science and before long we will regain the pre-eminence that we enjoyed in scientific pursuits in the golden age of Indian science. 2. Our astro-physicists, together with their colleagues, would have a better knowledge of the origin of the Universe. Our Vedanga Jyotisha, commonly known as the first Indian treatise on astronomy, had carried much valuable information on the Sun, Moon, stars, lunisolar calendars, etc. This shows that the importance of the history of the Universe was entrenched in classical Indian academia. This continues to the present day in countries that joined space research much after India. 3. Looking through the TMT, Indian and partner country astronomers would gain a better understanding of the process of “Reionisation” which is believed to have followed the “Big Bang”, or the origin of the universe. Had there not been “Reionisation”, it would have been impossible for the necessary gases in the Universe to reform and give Matter a process of evolution culminating in the formation of planets. Our Rig Veda mentioned the probability of a Big Bang long before any other civilisation. Around 1500 BC, our forefathers described the origin of the Universe as the bursting of a “cosmic egg” or “Brahmanda” containing the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the whole Universe –expanding and then collapsing again –a precursor to the Big Bang and Oscillating Universe theories. 4. The TMT will dedicate a lot of its resources to the study and characterisation of “Exoplanets” –or planets outside our own Solar System. This will be independent of the parallel project coming up on the Atacama Desert, Chile, called the European Extra Large Telescope, as a dedicated centre of Exoplanet exploration. In ancient India, our first astronomers recorded in the Vedas what is believed to be a Heliocentric solar system in which the Sun was at the centre. Aryabhatta is generally understood as “implicitly Heliocentric”. However, it must be pointed out that our golden age of science came to an abrupt end with invasions sweeping India from the 9th Century onwards. Had our progress reached logical continuity we would certainly have articulated what Aryabhatta most probably suggested –that Solar systems certainly exist beyond our own with their own families of planets. The official credit for this therefore goes to western philosophers. Between 1995 and the present day, more than 1400 Exoplanets have been discovered. So, thanks to our visionary Prime Minister, future generations of Indian scientists will once again give world knowledge pursuit the lead. How cannot we be true to our DNA? As a founding member of this important project, our scientists will be able to get up to 30 observing nights on the TMT per year. Apart from that, a number of high technology items for use in the project willbe produced in India. From the Indian side, this will be a joint project of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Department of Atomic Science (DAE). The Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), the Nainital and Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, will also participate.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 05:12:07 +0000
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