A 0.7m wide-field telescope set up in Ladakh as a joint partnership between IIA and IIT Bombay has tracked the rapid motion of the asteroid as it zipped across the sky at 10x lunar distance.
Varun Bhalerao, Astrophysicist at the space technology and astrophysics research (STAR) lab at IIT Bombay, posted the image what telescope captured on social media and said that the rapid motion of asteroid is so fast that it looks like streaks.
“Last night, the GROWTH-India Telescope caught this 116m, building-sized asteroid on its closest approach to earth! We tracked the rapid motion of the asteroid as it zipped across the sky at just 10x lunar distance. The rapid motion makes background stars look like streaks,” Bhalerao said on X.
GROWTH-India is India’s first fully robotic optical research telescope. This was constructed as a joint partnership between the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, with support from DST-SERB and IUSSTF. Current operations benefit from the generous support of the IIT Bombay alumni batch of 1994. The primary research focus of this telescope is time-domain astronomy: the study of explosive transients and variable sources in the universe.
To accomplish the primary science goals, we need a telescope that can start observations within the first 24 hours of the discovery of a transient event. The precise positions of these new sources are often unknown, hence we need a wide field of view for imaging them.