Nanital: Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) has placed the International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT), India's first liquid mirror telescope at Devasthal Observatory situated on a hilltop in the Nanital district of Uttrakhand. This liquid-mirror telescope will observe transient and variable objects such as asteroids, supernovae, space debris, and all other celestial objects from an altitude of 2,450 meters in the Himalayas. It has now entered the commissioning phase and will start scientific observations sometime in October this year.
The telescope was designed and built at the Advanced Mechanical and Optical Systems Corporation and the Centre Spatial de Liege, Belgium. The major instrumentation funding was jointly provided by Canada and Belgium while India will be responsible for the operations and upkeep of the telescope.
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," he said in a statement.
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.