The instal­la­tion is designed to reg­is­ter nat­ur­al flows of muons and high-ener­­gy neu­tri­nos and con­duct research based on the analy­sis and pro­cess­ing of accu­mu­lat­ed data.
The instal­la­tion is locat­ed 4 km from the shore of Lake Baikal at a depth of 1100–1300 m. The oper­at­ing prin­ci­ple is based on the reg­is­tra­tion of Cherenkov radi­a­tion (light flash­es) caused by the pas­sage of rel­a­tivis­tic par­ti­cles in the aquat­ic envi­ron­ment. Reg­is­tra­tion is per­formed by 228 opti­cal mod­ules that form a spa­tial lat­tice at a depth of 1100–1300 m. The tele­scope also includes hydro­log­i­cal equip­ment for con­tin­u­ous mon­i­tor­ing of the state of the aquat­ic envi­ron­ment. All work on installing deep-sea equip­ment is car­ried out from the ice cov­er of Lake Baikal.
The tele­scope is con­trolled and data is col­lect­ed using a local net­work of under­wa­ter com­put­ers. The pow­er sup­ply of the instal­la­tion and sig­nals are trans­mit­ted via bot­tom cables laid from the tele­scope to the Coastal Cen­ter, where pre­lim­i­nary sig­nal pro­cess­ing and trans­mis­sion of accu­mu­lat­ed data via Radio-Inter­net com­mu­ni­ca­tion lines to research cen­ters in Irkut­sk, Moscow and Ger­many are per­formed. The design of the tele­scope and the data pro­cess­ing sys­tem make it pos­si­ble to deter­mine the direc­tion of par­ti­cle arrival with an accu­ra­cy of 1.5 to 4 degrees, depend­ing on the task being solved, and the ener­gy spec­trum of par­ti­cle flux­es above 10 TeV.