• Geology Lab
• Remote Sensing Lab

IIST Astronomical Observatory

At the IIST campus, there is an astronomical observatory with a 14 inch and an 8 inch telescope with imaging and spectroscopic capabilities. The facility is used for undergraduate and postgraduate labs and outreach activities where students get a hands-on experience in carrying out interesting night sky observations.


Apart from this, there is an Astronomy Lab for instrument characterization. This lab is also equipped with desktops and workstations for data reduction and analysis.

Atmospheric Science Lab

Being relatively young (as started by visionaries in 2007), the departmental research facilities are growing significantly with time. The Atmospheric Science Laboratory at IIST was setup with a goal to provide training and research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students. The laboratory is equipped with the usual measuring equipment required for the development of analogue and digital electronic systems. The on-campus and off-campus facilities available for graduates and faculty research in atmospheric sciences are: standard meteorological instruments to monitor wind speed & direction, air temperature, relative humidity, pressure, rainfall, soil temperature & moisture; Computer lab in the department for weather data processing and analysis; Planetary Boundary Layer Laboratory with a wide variety of field instrumentation; Cloud-aerosol interactions laboratory housing a cloud condensation nucleus counter and surface based cloud droplet probe; Solar radiation instruments for energy budget studies; Air pollution and climatology observatory. Students are exposed to numerical modelling using PCs. In addition, high-performance computing systems are available for running regional to global models.

All members of the atmospheric sciences faculty are active in research and supervise graduate students' theses and dissertations. The laboratory is having very active doctoral programmes. At present, the faculty and graduate students are actively pursuing the research projects, like; Air-Sea interaction, Boundary Layer Meteorology, Climatology, Aerosol-Cloud-Solar radiation-Climate interaction, Radiative forcing; Satellite Remote Sensing; Data assimilation and Mesoscale modelling; Numerical Modeling of Weather systems; Climate Change.

Geology Lab

The geology lab in IIST has following facilities

• Good collection of rocks, minerals, fossils, planetary analogue minerals and rocks, and thin sections to examine their physical, chemical and optical properties
• Geological and geomorphological models and raised relief models to demonstrate various geological features and processes
• An advanced trinocular polarizing microscope (Nikon LV100POL) to study the optical properties of rocks and minerals using thin sections
• An advanced stereozoom trinocular microscope for mineral separation from rocks for further mineral chemical, geochronogical and hyperspectral analyses
• Computers in the lab are also equipped with various mineralogical and petrological softwares like IGPET, PETROPLOT, THERMOCAL, TWQ etc.
• Planetary geoscience lab: In collaboration with the Remote Sensing faculty, we make use of the ASD Field Spectro-radiometer to generate the hyper spectral profile of different minerals and rocks for planetary analogue research. The computers in this lab are equipped with softwares such as ENVI with IDL to process and interpret images from Moon and Mars. For example, we use ENVI with CAT (CRISM Analysis Toolkit), which is a collection of ENVI and IDL procedures for reading, displaying, and analyzing CRISM data, produced by the Mars CRISM Science Team.

CRISM Data Analysis Of Mawrth Vallis Region, Mars

Remote Sensing Lab

The remote sensing lab has several state-of-the-art equipments for extracting detailed information from satellite images and for carrying out field work. The laboratory currently has long range spectro-radiometers, plan canopy analyser, laser distometer, differential GPS, near real time display of INSAT 3A and Kalpana 1 products, and eCognition, an Object Oriented Image processing integrated GIS software. Undergraduate students are given the opportunity to have hands-on exposure to these technologies and tools. Through the lab students will have access to data from such ISRO satellites as Resourcesat, Cartosat, Oceansat – OCM, IRS-1A , IRS-1C and Envisat – ASAR (Microwave).