Indigenously designed and developed ‘Made in India’ Spectrograph, commissioned on Devasthal Optical Telescope in Nainital

Current GK ( Master) Science & Technology

Indian Scientists at Aryabhatta Research Institute of observational sciences (ARIES), Nainital, have indigenously designed and developed a low-cost optical Spectrograph named as Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC).
The ADFOSC spectroscope is the largest of its kind among the existing astronomical spectrographs in India.
It has been commissioned on the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT), in Nainital district of Uttarakhand. It is the largest reflecting telescope in India, as well as in Asia.
The ADFOSC spectrograph can locate sources of faint light from distant quasars and galaxies in a very young universe, regions around supermassive black-holes around the galaxies, and cosmic explosions.
So far, spectroscopes were imported from abroad at high costs. The ‘Made in India’ optical spectrograph is about 2.5 times less costly compared to the imported ones and can locate sources of light with a photon-rate as low as about 1 photon per second.
The ARIES is an autonomous institute of Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India.