Abstract
AstroSat, India’s first UV and X-ray astronomy satellite, has completed over six years of observations while in orbit around the Earth. It has carried out detailed studies of all kinds of objects in the Universe ranging from single stars, stars in clusters, binary stars with compact companions like neutron stars and black holes, star formation in galaxies, supermassive black holes in active nuclei of galaxies, etc. Here, I give a short description of its UV and X-ray telescopes and detectors. Some of the most important results obtained using AstroSat will be described in Part II.
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Acknowledgement
I acknowledge the efforts of all the scientists and engineers in TIFR, IIA, IUCAA, ISRO, ISSDC, RRI, PRL, VSSC, University of Leicester, UK, Canadian Space Agency, and several private contractors who made AstroSat a reality. I also acknowledge ISRO and the Payload Operation Centres (POCs) for allowing me to reproduce the pictures and figures of the payloads here. The work of all the people at the ISSDC and at the POCs of individual payloads, who are scheduling observations round the clock, and providing data to all the observers, is cheerfully acknowledged.
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Kulinder Pal Singh is an X-ray Astronomer who has worked on balloon, rocket and satellite borne X-ray telescopes and detectors for astronomy. He carries out multi-wavelength observations and data analysis. He developed India’s first X-ray focusing telescope for AstroSat at TIFR, Mumbai. He is an INSA Senior Scientist at IISER, Mohali after retiring from TIFR in 2017.
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Singh, K.P. AstroSat: I. The Scientific Instruments. Reson 27, 513–528 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-022-1346-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-022-1346-x