Researchers from the University of Leicester have been involved in the development of the first ever Indian satellite dedicated to astronomical observations, including of black holes, launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota in South-East India on Monday 28 September.
Astrosat, launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is designed to make studies of the ultra-violet, optical, low and high-energy X-ray emission from celestial objects at the same time and will be particularly useful at measuring the time variability of compact sources such as neutron stars and black holes, including the supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies.
The satellite’s instruments have been built by a consortium of institutes in India (the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR)), Mumbai, the Indian Institute for Astronomy (IIA), Bengaluru and the Indian Universities Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, (IUCAA), Pune in addition to ISRO, the Canadian Space Agency and the University of Leicester in the UK.
The team from the University of Leicester’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, led by Dr Gordon Stewart, has assembled a sensitive CCD camera for the Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT) constructed by a team led by Professor K. P. Singh in TIFR, Mumbai who have also provided the data processing electronics.
