GMRT Pune (World's largest Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope)

Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, located near Pune in India, is World's largest Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope is an array of radio telescopes at metre wavelengths. It is operated by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, a part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.

NCRA has set up a unique facility for radio astronomical research using the metrewavelengths range of the radio spectrum, known as the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), it is located at a site about 80 km north of Pune. GMRT consists of 30 fully steerable gigantic parabolic dishes of 45m diameter each spread over distances of upto 25 km. GMRT is one of the most challenging experimental programmes in basic sciences undertaken by Indian scientists and engineers.

The large size of the parabolic dishes implies that GMRT will have over three times the collecting area of the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, USA which consists of 27 antennas of 25 m diameter and is presently the world's largest aperture synthesis telescope operating at centimetre wavelengths. At 327 MHz, GMRT will be about 8 times more sensitive than VLA because of the larger collecting area, higher efficiency of the antennas and a substantially wider usable bandwidth because of the low level of man-made radio interference in India.

GMRT, about 10 km east of Narayangaon town on the Pune-Nasik highway, was selected after an extensive search in many parts of India, considering several important criteria such as low man-made radio noise, availability of good communication, vicinity of industrial, educational and other infrastructure and,a geographical latitude sufficiently north of the geomagnetic equator in order to have a reasonably quiet ionosphere and yet be able to observe a good part of the southern sky as well.