CASSA Colloquium 14: TART — Recent Developments and Future Plans

Speaker (online): Dr Tim Molteno, Electronics Research Foundation (New Zealand); Department of Physics, University of Otago (New Zealand); and Department of Physics & Electronics, Rhodes University (South Africa). Lead of the TART Project.

The talk will be delivered online at 3:00 pm Bangladesh time (9:00 pm in New Zealand) and screened at CASSA.

Abstract

TART — the Transient Array Radio Telescope, an open-source 24-antenna aperture-synthesis array developed at the University of Otago — was installed at IUB in November 2025, when CASSA hosted a five-day hands-on workshop with students from IUB and ten other universities. The array structure was designed and fabricated at Fab Lab IUB, and under Dr Molteno’s on-site supervision the telescope achieved first light on 18 November 2025, becoming Bangladesh’s first radio telescope and joining sister arrays across New Zealand, Africa and the Indian Ocean — details, and a map of the global TART network, are on our TART facility page. In this colloquium, Dr Molteno tells us what has happened since. In his own words:

The Transient Array Radio Telescope (TART) project has developed rapidly since the installation workshop held at CASSA in November 2025. I will outline some exciting recent developments including VLBI — very long baseline interferometry, where signals recorded by radio telescopes hundreds or thousands of kilometres apart are combined so that they act as a single instrument with extraordinarily sharp angular resolution — between TART sites, new hardware designs for real-time streaming of raw data (the Software Defined Radio Telescope, or SDTART), and give an overview of some current TART research projects.