Features
The large size of the telescope makes it highly sensitive. As an example, it is in principle capable of detecting signals from a mere 1 watt radio station located 10 million km away in space. The telescope sits on a natural slope of 11°, which matches the latitude of the location. This gives the telescope an equatorial mount which allows tracking of celestial sources for up to ten hours in the east-west direction. In the north-south direction, the telescope operates as a phased-array and is steerable by varying the phase gradients
The telescope can be operated in either total power or correlation mode. In each mode, 12 beams are formed and Beam 1 is the southern most beam and Beam 12 is the northern most. These 12-beam systems are useful in sky-survey type of observations. Recently, the reflecting surface of the ORT has been refurbished. A new digital back-end has been built for the ORT by the colleagues at Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bangalore.
Read more about this topic: Ooty Radio Telescope
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