P L RAJ IAS & IPS ACADEMY - AN INSTITUTION FOR IAS, IPS AND TNPSC EXAMINATION

GROWTH-TELESCOPE : SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

News: The GROWTH-India Telescope, located in Hanle, Ladakh, recently captured images of asteroid 2011 MW1 as it made a close approach to Earth.

What’s in the news?

This asteroid, approximately 116 meters in size, traveled at a speed of 28,946 kilometers per hour and passed at a distance of about 10 times the lunar distance.
The rapid motion of the asteroid was so swift that it caused background stars to appear as streaks in the telescope's images.
The GROWTH-India Telescope, India's first fully robotic optical research telescope, is part of the GROWTH project, an international network of observatories focused on time-domain astronomy.
This project is a collaborative effort involving institutions such as the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), with support from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum.
The network aims to provide continuous monitoring of interesting celestial events, ensuring observations are not interrupted by daylight.
2011 MW1 was classified as a Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) and it came close to Earth at a staggering speed of 28,946 kilometers per hour.

Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH)

The GROWTH program is a 5 year project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF is a United States government agency whose mission includes support for all fields of fundamental science and engineering, except for medical sciences.
It is an international collaborative network of astronomers and telescopes dedicated to the study of short-lived cosmic transients and near-earth asteroids.
Cosmic transients are energetic flashes of light that are millions to billions of times the brightness of the sun, e.g. explosive deaths of massive stars, white dwarf detonations, etc.
Key follow-up observations of fast-fading or fast-moving events must occur at night promptly after discovery but before the sun rises.
Therefore, a relay or network of telescopes spanning multiple longitudes (time-zones) on earth is required to pass the baton amongst each other to effectively extend the night-time darkness.