Five ACT students launch PART Telescopes to put $500 radio astronomy kits in rural schools
The Narrabundah College team published open docs and software for capturing the 21 cm hydrogen line with off-the-shelf parts, backed by Science Mentors ACT.
By Ryan Merket ยท
Why it matters
Operators and educators talk about access gaps, but they rarely come with a bill of materials, a tested workflow, and a shipping plan. PART Telescopes puts a sub-500 AUD, hydrogen-line-capable radio telescope within reach of rural classrooms and backs it with open docs. If this student-led pilot proves out, the model can scale beyond Australia and turn more schools into contributors rather than spectators in astronomy.
Narayan Dwan-Holland, Aliana He, Kevin Fang, Emma Enyu Zhang and Yanfu Fan have launched PART Telescopes, a student-built effort to design and freely distribute 25 low-cost radio telescopes to rural Australian schools.
The five founders are students at Narrabundah College in the Australian Capital Territory, working under the Science Mentors ACT program. On their site, they frame the project as a response to the gap in STEM resources for remote classrooms and cite a 2023 Department of Education report that remote 15-year-olds are, on average, 1.5 years behind metropolitan peers in STEM. Rather than wait for grants to trickle down, the team is trying to make radio astronomy hands-on and affordable now.
What they built
The PART design targets a total bill of materials under AUD 500 and is capable of recording signals at the 21 cm line, the galactic hydrogen frequency that is the entry point for a lot of radio astronomy. According to the project site, the telescope uses a commercially available weather satellite dish and a conductive plastic base to collect signal, feeding a chain of low-noise amplifiers, bandpass filters, a software-defined radio (RTL-SDR), and a motor system for pointing.
On the software side, PART is publishing open documentation and a workflow for recording and processing data from RTL-SDR devices. The team recommends starting with installation, then following the capture and analysis path in the docs, so teachers can go from unboxing to first hydrogen line plots with a single set of instructions.
Who it is for
Their first audience is rural high schools and colleges that are often priced out of astronomy equipment. The plan, spelled out on their homepage, is to manufacture 25 units and distribute them for free to educators outside major metros, along with the know-how to use them in class and contribute observations.
PART lists support from Science Mentors ACT and Narrabundah College. For educators and students, the site functions as both announcement and guidebook: setup instructions, parts list, and a software workflow live in one place so a single classroom can replicate the build.
The bet
The founders are betting that a simple, reliable design plus clear, open docs is enough to convert latent interest in the cosmos into hands-on labs and real data. If the 25-unit pilot lands well in rural Australia, the pattern is replicable: off-the-shelf hardware, a few hundred dollars in parts, and a clear path to data that any motivated teacher can follow.