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.