Welcome to the MRT home page

Please note that this page is under construction so many of the links may not exist.

The MRT. is a joint project of the

Indian Institute of Astrophysics

and the

Raman Research Institute

The project was started by Prof. Ch.V. Sastry of IIA. The responsibility for supervision at the site resides with Dr. N. Uday Shankar of RRI.

Some pictures of our telescope site are here

Our newest and most exciting result is here

The MRT specifications are as follows:

Location: Bras d'Eau, N E Mauritius. Latitude: 20^oS. Longitude: 60E.
Instrument zenith Declination: -40.
Centre frequency: 151.5MHz
Final total collecting area: 16000 m²
Primary beam response: 60^o
Resolution at zenith: 4' x 4'
Instantaneous RF bandwidth: 0.75/1.5/3 MHz.
Approximate Sensitivity for the survey: 150 mJy.

The MRT is a 2km x 1km T-shaped aperture synthesis array. The 2km EW arm has 1024 fixed 2m helical antennae. The 1km NS arm has 64 antennae on 16 moveable trolleys. In the EW and NS arms the signals from 4 adjacent elements are phase equalised and combined. In turn, in the E-W arm after filtering and amplification, 8 such outputs are phase equalised and combined to produce a single section output. There are 32 of these sections. Because of the non-uniformity of the terrain the EW sections are at a number of different levels. After further processing these 32 channels and the 16 NS channels are correlated using a 1024 channel correlator receiver from the former Clark Lake array. Bandwidth decorrelation limits the sky coverage to ~10^o. To cover the complete beam of 60^o there is need to introduce delays. To this end a recirculator system is used which stores the astronomical data and reprocesses it through the correlators each time with a different delay. The Data Acquisition System interfaces the correlator to a PC. Its storage data format is compatible for transferring data to a set of workstations for further processing. For this we use PCs running the superb Linux O/S. (Faster local link to a Linux home page). We have been rescued in term of computing power by those wonderful people supplying the Linux distrubution.

Scientific Objectives

To make a survey of the southern sky at 151.5 MHz with a sensitivity of 150 mJy.
To map the Galactic plane.
to produce a point source catalogue (equivalent to the Cambridge 6C survey) for the Declination range from -10^o to -70^o.
To study pulsars.
To discover new things

The Team

Nalini Issur (UoM)

Radhakhrishna (Dinesh) Somanah (uom)

Kumar Golap (uom)

Richard Guy Dodson (Durham University)

Sandeep Sachdev (Raman Research Institute)

Udaya Shankar (Raman Research Institute )

Girish K Beeharry UoM

Things being done

We are collecting data for the full survey but there are different regions which are being imaged with different resolutions. E.g. a low resolution map of part of the galactic plane . See the individual pages of the members to get more info of what is being done

What has been done in the past

Here are some images that others have done. The GEETEE survey done in RRI by Uday and Dwaka. Ref K.S. Dwarakanath and N. Udaya Shankar 1990, J. Astrophys. Astr., 11 323. (fits file version here )

The 408 MHz survey done by lots of people. Ref Haslam et al, 1982, A and AS 47, 1.

If you want more you should look to the NASA page SkyView

For detailed information, expressions of support or anything else , please send e-mail to mrt@icarus.uom.ac.mu