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.
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.
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).