With the aid of South Africa’s MeerKAT Telescope, India’s Automated Radio Telescope Image Processing Pipeline (ARTIP) technology has enabled some amazing discoveries from far-off galaxies. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Telescope, renowned for its exceptional sensitivity and capacity for sky surveys, is preceded by MeerKAT. To fully utilize MeerKAT’s potential for ground-breaking research, ARTIP’s state-of-the-art picture data processing is essential.
What is ARTIP?
- Creation by Thoughtworks: The international technology consulting business Thoughtworks created ARTIP at its Bengaluru and Pune, India, offices.
- Automation of Data Processing: This partnership has been working to automate data processing, imaging, calibration, and flagging, among other crucial operations, since 2017.
How ARTIP operates?
- Configurability: ARTIP is a highly flexible and configurable system that is intended to process data supplied by MeerKAT. Although it was designed with MeerKAT in mind, its flexibility enables it to handle data from VLA class telescopes as well as uGMRT.
- Pipeline Components: The pipeline is divided into four distinct sub-pipelines that serve distinct phases of the data processing workflow: diagnostics, cube imaging, continuum imaging, and calibration.
- Calibration (ARTIP-CAL): This part extracts the target source of interest by calibrating data against recognized astronomical sources.
- Cube Imaging (ARTIP-CUBE): This component is then utilized to create sky images based on the calibrated target.
- The goal of the Continuum Imaging (ARTIPCONT) process is to produce images using the calibrated data.
- Diagnostics (ARTIP-DIAGNOSTICS): It serves as a pipeline for quality assurance and offers analytical insights into data processing and quality.
Impactful Discoveries by ARTIP
- Detection of the Hydroxyl Radical (OH): ARTIP has made important discoveries, such as identifying the hydroxyl radical (OH), a necessary chemical species present in a far-off galaxy’s atmosphere.
- Hydrogen Atom Identification: It has also been instrumental in the identification of large hydrogen atoms (also known as Rydberg atoms) in a different far-off galaxy.
- Scientific Acknowledgment: The worldwide astronomical publication Proceedings of Science has recognized the MALS data processing using ARTIP for its contributions to these discoveries.
