India-made warship for Mauritius launched

The offshore patrol vessel that the country has been building for Mauritius was launched on 2nd Aug 2013 in the waters at the Kolkata-based Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers (GRSE), a public sector shipyard that has been executing the project.
Mauritius and India had signed the warship contract on March 4, 2011, marking a significant milestone in the Indo-Mauritian co-operation and friendship. This order also ushered in a new chapter in shipbuilding in the country, with the first-ever export order for a warship placed on an Indian shipyard.
 GRSE was scheduled to deliver the warship to the Mauritius Coast Guard by September 2014, the shipyard’s chairman and managing director Rear Admiral (Rtd) A K Verma said during the launch function in Kolkata.  The vessel has a length of 74.10 metre and a width of 11.40 metre. It would be capable of a maximum speed of 20 knots and would have an approximate displacement of 1,300 tonnes.The CGS Barracuda, long of 75 meters and can browse 5,000 nautical miles at a speed of 20 knots.
Equipped with high technology and advanced systems of electronic navigation equipment, the patrol will deploy in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) for various monitoring missions, and will fight against piracy, illegal fishing and drug trafficking.
  The new patrol will also make its contribution to search and rescue operations carried out in Mauritian water

 

The Thirty Meter Telescope The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is a planned ground-based large segmented mirror reflecting telescope, proposed to be built on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Partner nations India, China, Japan, Canada and the US.The telescope is much larger than existing telescopes (though the planned European Extremely Large Telescope's mirror is 30% larger), and designed for observations from the near-ultraviolet to the mid-infrared (0.31 to 28 μm wavelengths). In addition, its adaptive optics system would help correct for image blur caused by the atmosphere of the Earth, helping it to reach the potential of such a large mirror. The TMT is the focal point of a legal battle in the State of Hawaiʻi over construction on Mauna Kea, which Native Hawaiians hold sacred.

TMT Foundation outlines the following aims for the observatory:

• Dark energy, dark matter and tests of the Standard Model of particle physics
• Characterization of the first stars and galaxies in the Universe
• Characterization of the epoch of reionization
• Galaxy assembly and evolution over the past 13 billion years
• Connections between supermassive black holes and galaxies
• Star-by-star dissection of galaxies out to 10 million parsecs
• Physics of planet and star formation
• Exoplanet discovery and characterization
• Kuiper belt object surface chemistry
• Solar system planetary atmosphere chemistry and meteorology
• The search for life on planets outside the Solar System

 The TMT Observatory Corporation is a partnership between:

• Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy (ACURA)
• California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
• University of California (UC)
• Department of Science and Technology of India
• National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
• National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

 Additional major partners for the construction and operations phase.

• In 2008, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) joined TMT as a Collaborating Institution.
• In 2009, the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) joined TMT as an Observer.
• In 2010, a consortium of Indian Astronomy Research Institutes (IIA, IUCAA and ARIES) joined TMT project as an observer. The observer status is the first step in becoming a full partner in TMT and participating in the engineering development and scientific use of the observatory (Subject to approval of funding from Indian Government).
• In 2012, India and China became partners, with representatives on the TMT board. China and India will pay a share of the telescope construction costs, expected to top $1 billion.

Three Indian companies - GOAL, Bangalore-based Avasarala, and Godrej and Boyce - will develop and manufacture Rs 700 crore worth of components for the telescope. General Optics Asia Ltd (GOAL), a Pondicherry-based niche firm that makes strategic components for space and defence.The Rs 210-crore Avasarala had earlier worked on the Large Hadron Collider for developing support for the large magnets underground. Both Avasarala and Godrej and Boyce have previously worked on sensitive defence and space projects.