Current Affairs - Science - Discussion

A Pune-based IT firm is developing software for the world's largest ground-based telescope, the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT), which is likely to come up on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The telescope is being constructed jointly by India, US, China, Japan and Canada and is likely to become operational in the mid-2020s. India is building the telescope's complex optical structure, called the Segment Support Assembly (SSA), which will comprise 492 hexagonal mirror segments, collectively forming the primary mirror. An eight-member team at the IT firm, ThoughtWorks, is designing three different software - Common Software Services (CSS), Data Management Services(DMS) and Executive Software (ES) - to deal with the control systems to manoeuvre the telescope and manage the big data that will be generated once it becomes operational.