Our names are Narayan Dwan-Holland, Aliana He, Kevin Fan, Emma Enyu Zhang and Yanfu Fan.
As students from Narrabundah College, ACT, and participants of the Science Mentors ACT program, the Project for Accessible Radio Telescopes (PART) is our initiative aimed at designing, manufacturing and distributing telescopes for rural educators and students to support their endeavours in the study of astronomy. .
We aim to produce a simple yet reliable telescope design with a total production and assembly cost of under $500.00, capable of recording signals at the 21-cm line, an important frequency band associated with galactic hydrogen. Our design consists of a commercially available weather satellite dish and a conductive plastic base to collect signal, alongside a signal processing system with low-noise amplifiers, bandpass filters, a software-designed-radio and a motor system.
We seek to manufacture 25 such telescopes to distribute freely amongst rural high schools and colleges.
Due to monetary and accessibility constraints, many rural Australian schools are unable to afford telescopes and hence limited in their study of the universe. We wish to empower the affected students and educators by providing rural schools with the necessary equipment and knowledge to engage in astronomy.
In doing so, we hope to address the stark contrast in education between urban and rural Australian settings. According to a 2023 report by the Department of Education, “the average 15-year-old in remote Australia is 1.5 years behind metropolitan students in STEM subjects”, an inequality we aim to combat through increasing access to accurate scientific instruments. Moreover, rural access to radio astronomy instruments will bolster existing radio astronomical research - we believe that our project will enable the contribution of higher-quality data to the existing pool of astronomical research.