There are two kinds of telescopes that are used to peer towards the sky – Optical telescopes, which help capture faint, faraway light sources and enable their study; Radio telescopes, which use giant antennae to capture radio waves from afar and help derive data out of them.
While optical telescopes and observatories are more commonly known, they have a limitation of only operating during the night. However, Radio telescopes can capture radio signals round-the-clock.
Based in a South African desert, the MeerKAT radio telescope comprising 64 antennae is the largest and most sensitive of its kind in the world, so far.
Some interesting observations from this telescope have emerged, thanks to data processing software written by Indian techies.
Known as the ‘Automated Radio Telescope Image Processing Pipeline'(ARTIP), it is meant to help process the huge amount of radio signal data generated by the telescope and convert it into data that can be used for scientific studies.
“There is a lot of noise (disturbance) in the radio signals, so that has to be cleaned up, signals have to be calibrated, data processing has to be carried out that’s how the ARTIP software speeds up the process for scientists,” Chhaya Dhanani, Portfolio Head Engineering for Research, Thoughtworks, told WION.
A five-member team from Pune, India, working for this global software firm has designed and developed this software from scratch. We have been working on developing this software since 2017 and we had the first version released in 2020 and even now modifications are being made. The data processed using our software has also been released, Dhanani said.
Based on the data derived using our software, the science teams working on it have made multiple publications in international peer-reviewed journals. Among the discoveries made are of OH radicals in faraway galaxies and Rydberg atoms (massive hydrogen atoms) in a distant galaxy, she said. The software processed more than 1 Petabyte (1000Terabytes) of data to arrive at this.
While the data is provided by the software, it is interpreted and studied by the MeerKAT Absorption Line Survey (MALS) team that comprises Indian and South African scientists. The principal investigator in this project is Dr. Neeraj Gupta from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA).
“All science telescopes make use of data processing software and at some point in time, they require human intervention. With ARTIP, we have ensured that manual intervention is not required. The data can directly be studied by the science teams and they can draw observations from it,” she added.
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The MeerKAT telescope is only a precursor to the world’s largest array of radio telescopes – Square Kilometre Array (SKA). MeerKAT is eventually meant to be subsumed into the SKA. The SKA can scan the skies for radio signals, using its unprecedented capabilities. It is capable of generating massive amounts of data, almost comparable to how much the internet does in a day. Thoughtworks’ E4R(Engineering for Research) division hopes to scale up ARTIP to aid the teams working with SKA data as well, Chhaya said.
