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GS-III : S&T Space

28 August, 2021
12 Min Read

ASTROSAT Mission

ASTROSAT is India’s first dedicated multi-wavelength space observatory.

AstroSat is the first dedicated Indian astronomy mission aimed at studying celestial sources in X-ray, optical and UV spectral bands simultaneously.
The payloads cover the energy bands of Ultraviolet (Near and Far), limited optical and X-ray regime (0.3 keV to 100keV).
One of the unique features of AstroSat mission is that it enables the simultaneous multi-wavelength observations of various astronomical objects with a single satellite.
AstroSat with a lift-off mass of 1515 kg was launched on September 28, 2015 into a 650 km orbit inclined at an angle of 6 deg to the equator by PSLV-C30 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota. The minimum useful life of the AstroSat mission is expected to be 5 years.
The science data gathered by five payloads of AstroSat are telemetered to the ground station at MOX. The data is then processed, archived and distributed by Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC) located at Bylalu, near Bengaluru.

The scientific objectives of AstroSat mission are:

To understand high energy processes in binary star systems containing neutron stars and black holes;
Estimate magnetic fields of neutron stars;
Study star birth regions and high energy processes in star systems lying beyond our galaxy;
Detect new briefly bright X-ray sources in the sky;
Perform a limited deep field survey of the Universe in the Ultraviolet region.

ASTROSAT detects a rare galaxy

India’s first multi-wavelength satellite, which has five unique X-ray and ultraviolet telescopes working in tandem, AstroSat, has detected extreme-UV light from a galaxy, called AUDFs01, 9.3 billion light-years away from Earth,” Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) said.
The discovery was made by an international team of astronomers led by Dr Kanak Saha, associate professor of astronomy at the IUCAA, and published on August 24 by ‘Nature Astronomy’, the release said.
This team comprised scientists from India, France, Switzerland, the USA, Japan and The Netherlands.
Saha and his team observed the galaxy, which is located in the Hubble Extreme Deep field, through AstroSat.
Earlier, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST), a significantly larger than UVIT (UV imaging telescope), did not detect any UV emission (with energygreater than 13.6 eV) from this galaxy because it is too faint, it said.
AstroSat/UVIT was able to achieve this unique feat because the background noise in the UVITdetector is much less than the ones on HST

Source: ISRO

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