[1] It is part of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA)[2][3][4] of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), which is funded by the Government of India through the Department of Atomic Energy.

[10] The reflecting surface of the telescope is made of 1,100 thin stainless-steel wires running parallel to each other for the entire length of the cylinder and supported on 24 steerable parabolic frames.

The high sensitivity of the feed system and the large collecting area of ORT has been exploited for the studies of astrophysical phenomena such as pulsars, solar wind, recombination lines, and protogalaxies.

[15] As of 2017[update], the ORT is undergoing a major upgrade to its receiver chain, which will result in a new system called the Ooty Wide Field Array (OWFA).

The OWFA is designed to function as a 264-element interferometric array, and to provide a significantly larger instantaneous bandwidth as well as field-of-view compared to the legacy ORT receiver system.

Additionally this upgrade is also expected to open other avenues of research particularly in the newly emerging areas of 21 cm (8.3 in) intensity mapping[16][17][18][19][20][21][22] and studies of transient radio sources.

The application of this database to observational cosmology provided independent evidence against the steady state theory and supported the Big Bang model of the universe.