BENGALURU: An India-built picture knowledge processing expertise has led to important discoveries from distant galaxies being noticed by the MeerKAT Telescope positioned within the South African desert.
MeerKAT includes 64 antennas and serves as a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Telescope, providing 50 occasions larger sensitivity and 10,000 occasions sooner sky survey capabilities in comparison with present telescopes.
And, the Automated Radio Telescope Image Processing Pipeline (ARTIP) developed on the India workplaces — Bengaluru and Pune — of world expertise consultancy agency Thoughtworks has been serving to the MeerKAT Absorption Live Survey (MALS).Chhaya Dhanani, portfolio head, engineering for analysis at Thoughtworks informed TOI: “ARTIP was built for MALS, on MeerKAT. The principal investigator involved is Neeraj Gupta from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune. This collaboration has been active since 2017, aiming to automate data processing, flagging, calibration, and imaging.”
Discoveries
IUCAA’s Gupta acknowledges the agency’s contribution in leveraging modern software program engineering instruments and practices to course of greater than 1PB (petabyte) of MeerKAT knowledge, enabling groundbreaking discoveries and benefiting the complete astronomy neighborhood.
ARTIP has led to important discoveries, similar to detecting the hydroxyl radical (OH), an essential chemical species all through the environment in a galaxy, and figuring out large hydrogen atoms (Rydberg atoms) in a distant galaxy.

“…The two major discoveries during the course of the survey can be attributed to ARTIP. A publication on the MALS in the international astronomical journal, Proceedings of Science recognises work for MALS data processing with ARTIP,” Dhanani stated.
How ARTIP works
ARTIP is a extremely configurable and customisable pipeline designed to course of knowledge generated by MeerKAT. The deployment is configured for MeerKAT, however the excessive configurability permits it for use on knowledge produced from uGMRT, and VLA class of telescopes, Dhanani stated.
“It can be deployed on a range of infrastructure ranging from a consumer grade desktop to a high end multi node cluster. It consists of four individual sub-pipelines, including one for calibration, which fit into different stages of the data processing workflow,” she added.
The calibration pipeline (ARTIP-CAL) is used to calibrate the information towards recognized astronomical sources and extract the supply of curiosity or goal supply.
“Using the cube-imaging pipeline (ARTIP-CUBE), the calibrated target is then used to generate the sky images using the continuum-imaging pipeline (ARTIP-CONT)… All these pipelines work in tandem with a diagnostics pipeline (ARTIP-DIAGNOSTICS) which provides analysis insights into the data processing, data and image quality, and works as a quality assurance pipeline,” Dhanani added.
The collaboration
The Thoughtworks crew initially consisted of four-five members based mostly in Pune, India, however has since expanded to incorporate members from different places like Bengaluru. They presently deal with supporting the general public knowledge launch.
But the agency’s involvement extends past ARTIP growth, Dhanani stated, including that it’s a part of SKA-India and actively participates in future software program growth for the telescope.
“Additionally, we collaborate with scientific institutes to research and build prototypes for large-scale data processing and analysis,” she stated.