While the union railway ministry has given ‘in-principle’ approval to the Pune-Nashik high-speed railway project earlier this week, scientists at the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) located near Narayangaon, Pune, are concerned that the project may create problems for the facility. Whereas the Maharashtra Rail Infrastructure Development Corporation (MRIDC) or MahaRail has sought to allay the scientists’ apprehensions by assuring that the issue will be resolved in the coming days.
The GMRT is an array of 30 fully-steerable, parabolic radio telescopes with a diameter of 45 metres’ each. According to researchers at GMRT, the proposed route for the high-speed railway project at one particular point passes through a radius of around 1 kilometre from some of the antennae installed in the vicinity of the GMRT facility, spread over 15 square kilometres on the Pune-Nashik route.
According to the researchers, the sparks caused by the pantograph during the movement of the train on the electric line will impact the frequencies used by the GMRT and may adversely affect their research work.
