Article Posted on : - Oct 30, 2024

KOLKATA (PTI): Defence PSU Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers (GRSE) Ltd on Tuesday signed a contract with the Naval Physical and Oceanographic Laboratory (NPOL) for construction of an acoustic research ship, an official said.

The value of the contract signed between GRSE and NPOL at Kochi is Rs 490.98 crore, he said.

NPOL, based in Kerala's Kochi, is a laboratory under the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

The overall length of the ship will be 90 metres and it will be 14 metres wide, capable of speeds ranging from 4 knots to 12 knots, the GRSE official said.

The ship's capabilities will include deployment, towing and retrieval of various equipment such as acoustic modules, carrying out temporal and/or spatial high-resolution surveys of sound velocity profiles and collection of ocean tides/current information to be used for survey optimisation, design of underwater moorings and offshore deployments, he said in a press statement.

The research vessel will also carry out meteorological surveys to understand the influence of atmospheric parameters in sound propagation studies and undertake shallow-water acoustic reverberation studies.