Defence PSU Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers (GRSE) Ltd on Wednesday laid the keel for an advanced acoustic research ship (ARS) which it is building for the Naval Physical and Oceanographic Laboratory (NPOL), a DRDO unit, an official statement said.
With an overall length of 93 metres and width of 18 metres, the ARS will be a very advanced platform with state-of-the-art research equipment, the GRSE statement said.
Stating that the ARS will be capable of speeds ranging from 4 knots to 12 knots, it said that at top speed, the ship will have an endurance of 30 days or 4,500 nautical miles in a single mission.
The capabilities of the ARS will include deployment, towing and retrieval of various equipment such as acoustic modules, carrying out temporal and spatial high-resolution surveys of sound velocity profiles and collection of current information for use in survey optimisation, the statement said.
The research vessel, contract for which was signed between GRSE and NPOL in October 2024, will also carry out meteorological surveys to understand the influence of atmospheric parameters in sound propagation studies and undertake shallow water acoustic reverberation studies.
Warship builder GRSE has the necessary experience in the construction of research and survey vessels, having delivered the first series of Sandhayak class of survey vessels to the Indian Navy in the 1980s and 1990s, the statement added.