How an Australian Teen Team Is Making Radio Astronomy Affordable for Rural Schools
PART, the Project for Accessible Radio Telescopes, was created by five students from Narrabundah College in the Australian Capital Territory: Narayan Dwan-Holland, Aliana He, Kevin Fang, Emma Enyu Zhang, and Yanfu Fan. Working through the Science Mentors ACT program, they are trying to solve a problem that is at once technical and deeply practical: how do you make serious astronomy possible in classrooms far from major cities, without making it expensive, fragile, or impossible to learn from?
Their answer is a design that is deliberately unglamorous in the best possible way. Instead of exotic observatory hardware, PART uses a weather satellite dish, a conductive base, low-noise amplifiers, bandpass filters, a software-defined radio, and a motor system. That mix is important because it reflects the project’s philosophy: accessibility does not mean lowering ambition. It means stripping away cost and complexity until the essential science is still there.
