35th Annual Report (2022-2023) - ENGLISH

16 talented pool of students. Typically about 15 students enrol each year for this course. The first batch of students from this programme will be graduating in June 2023. It is expected that based on the practical experience gained from this program IUCAA will be in a position to recommend an elaborate M.Sc Physics (Astrophysics) course structure consisting of a wide range of laboratory experiments related to A&A. Given the ever growing activities of IUCAA academics, we are looking forward to filling available vacant posts as soon as possiblewith talented individuals. Due to a sustained efforts there is a clear increasing trend in the number of active IUCAA associateswith time. Now the total number of associates stands at 216 and IUCAA hopes to bring it close to 300 as soon as possible. In particular, efforts are being made to include people with technical skills that are useful for Astronomy missions from the engineering departments. Due to this increase in the number of associates we also see a strong increase in the number of publications originating from associates and their students. It is recommended by a review committee that IUCAA should set up various working groups constituting of associates and IUCAA faculty in different subject areas. These groups will plan long and short term activities, in particular the effective upgradation and utilisation of various IUCAA programmes and facilities. IUCAA has established about 24 IUCAA Centre for Astronomy Research and Development (ICARD). These were established to contribute to development of upto date course structures and new kinds of experiment/data analysis sessions which can be a part of a starting or existing Astronomy course in a University. Due to Covid-19 restrictions the increase in number of ICARDs is slower than what was planned. We hope to establish more such centres in remote areas of India to increase our reach. At present SARATI a powerful HPC facility at IUCAA is dedicated to LIGO data analysis and is IUCAA's contribution to International Gravitational Wave Observatory Network (IGWN). SARATI accounts for about 15% of IGWN computing resources. PEGASUS HPC cluster is the dedicated facility made available to the general users of IUCAA and researchers from Indian universities. I amhappy to note that these facilities are fully utilised and fractional usage from the university faculty is about 50%. This fraction increases during the holiday periods as several associates could visit IUCAA with their students and focus all their efforts on research work. In particular, PEGASUS HPC is used to perform wide range of MHD and cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. There is a clear demand for increasing the computing resources at IUCAA. It is well documented that, investing in national level large HPCs is absolutely essential to plan innovative observational strategies and interpret the data that will be coming from all Mega- science facilities. Recently, we have made a presentation to the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) to host a large cluster at IUCAA fully dedicated to the Astronomy & Astrophysics research as part of theNSM-2 project. Instrumentation lab at IUCAA is building the Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) that is part of ADITYA-L1 solar mission. I am happy to report that the integration and testing of SUIT is completed. It has successfully gone through the vibration and acoustic tests in the end of March 2023. The telescope will be deliver to ISRO to be integrated with Aditya-L1. All the post-launch operation strategy and plans are finalised. Software for pipeline data reduction is being developed at IUCAA. I congratulate our instrumentation team for their efforts and wish them very good luck for a perfect placement of the telescope in its planned location in space. I am also happy to inform that all the necessary components required to build a high precision atomic clock are developed in the Precision & Quantum Measurement (PQM) laboratory. The next important instrument developed at IUCAA's instrumentation lab is Wide-Area Linear Optical Polarimeter (WALOP). This is mainly funded from external sources through multi-institutional collaboration. Two WALOPs (South and North) have been designed and are being built at IUCAA as part of an international collaboration between Caltech, University of Crete, Greece and SAAO. The data from this instrument will help create a 3D tomographic map of the galactic magnetic fields and dust cloud structure. The first instrument is expected to be ready by end of this year or early next year. IUCAA is also developing labs and skilled instrumentation team to carryout the commissioning and post commissioning operations of LIGO-INDIA. To address the space requirements for these labs IUCAA is now constructing a new building (called IUCAA-2) in the old science park area. The ground breaking ceremony for this building took place on 24 February 2023 when Prof. Narlikar has formally initiated this building activities. IUCAA's Computer Centre also hosts ASTROSAT Science Support Cell (ASSC) and Payload Operation Centre (POC) for the CZTI instrument onboard ASTROSAT. ASSC is funded by ISRO to develop and help the user community to effectively analyse the existing ASTROSAT data and