Mauritius Radio Telescope, Radio telescope in Bras d'Eau National Park, Mauritius

The Mauritius Radio Telescope is a research facility with antennas arranged in a T-shaped pattern that captures radio waves from space. The installation processes these signals to create detailed maps of distant cosmic objects in the Southern Hemisphere sky.

First commissioned in 1992, the Mauritius Radio Telescope was initiated by Prof. Ch.V. Sastry of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and run for nearly five years by Prof. N. Uday Shankar of the Raman Research Institute. It is a joint project of the University of Mauritius, the IIA and the RRI. Its 880 m North-South arm was built along the old Port Louis to Flacq railway line, which closed in 1964.

The telescope is run jointly by the University of Mauritius, the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the Raman Research Institute. It was initiated by Prof. Ch. V. Sastry of the IIA and run for nearly five years by Prof. N. Uday Shankar of the RRI; its head in Mauritius rotates between Dr Nalini Issur, Dr Girish Beeharry and Dr Radhakrishna Somanah.

The site is located within a protected natural area and is not typically open to the public since active research takes place there. Visitors interested in the facility should check in advance whether guided tours or special access times are available.

The North–South arm follows the bed of the Port Louis–Flacq railway, closed in 1964, and its 15 trolleys each carry four antennas. Observations repeat 62 times as the trolleys roll south, and the one-dimensional daily data are stacked into a two-dimensional sky map. Because the East–West arm is not co-planar, new imaging techniques were developed to clean the raw "dirty maps".