AstroSat: I. The Scientific Instruments

Abstract

AstroSat, India’s first UV and X-ray astronomy satellite, has completed over six years of observations while in orbit around the Earth. It has carried out detailed studies of all kinds of objects in the Universe ranging from single stars, stars in clusters, binary stars with compact companions like neutron stars and black holes, star formation in galaxies, supermassive black holes in active nuclei of galaxies, etc. Here, I give a short description of its UV and X-ray telescopes and detectors. Some of the most important results obtained using AstroSat will be described in Part II.