M4L6: Science be used a tool for diplomacy?

On March 31, 2016 Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel inaugurated the 3.6m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT) near Nainital, India. The telescope optics has been built in collaboration with the Belgian firm Advanced Mechanical & Optical System (AMOS) and the rest was managed by Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES)

The 3.6m DOT is currently the largest reflecting telescope in Asia and is a clear-aperture Ritchey–Chrétien telescope

India has also launched a multi-country collaborative initiative known as ‘Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen’ (GROWTH) to observe transient events in the universe. Universities and research institutes from the US, the UK, Japan, India, Germany, Taiwan and Israel are part of the initiative.

Under the same, the first robotic telescope has been installed at Hanle in Ladakh. The 70 cm robotic telescope, that costs Rs 3.5 Crore has a sensitive camera capable of detecting even the faintest transients found by partner survey telescopes such as the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar, California. It is also is programmed to directly communicate with different ground-based and space-based surveys searching for transient sources. This include other larger facilities operated by Indian Astronomical Observatory IAO like the Himalayan Chandra Telescope, the gamma-ray array telescope (HAGAR), and the imaging Cherenkov telescope (MACE). Space based facilities include ASTROSAT, recently built by Space application Centre of ISRO.

The telescope is expected to generate enormous amounts of data - over one thousand gigabytes in a year. It is a joint project of the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIAp) and IIT Bombay. The project is fully funded by the Science and Engineering Research Board of the Department of Science and Technology, under the PIRE project, administered by the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum.

We will use one more example and then jump to space technology. Back in the year, 2015, India and Norway had together launched a project known as Indarc, Since Norway is close to Arctic, India chose to collaborate with Norway to study the impact of Arctic ice melt on Northern Hemisphere.