TART

TART — the Transient Array Radio Telescope — is CASSA's radio instrument, housed at IUB CORE on the rooftop of the Main Academic Building. Every one of its 24 all-sky GPS antennas is correlated with every other to form 276 baselines, and an open-source aperture-synthesis pipeline turns those into a full-sky radio image about once a minute. It is operated by CASSA as part of the RAIN (Radio Astronomy Instrumentation) research area.

TART at IUB is the product of an international collaboration. The receivers and digital electronics — the heart of the instrument — were designed and supplied by the open-source TART project at the University of Otago, New Zealand. The antenna array was fabricated at the IUB Fab Lab, and CASSA provided the rooftop site, student researchers, and project coordination, with funding from IUB.

After more than six months of work — held up for a time by electronic complications — the instrument was assembled and brought online during CASSA Workshop 2, "Installing a Radio Telescope to Image the Invisible" (17–21 November 2025). It detected its first radio signals on 18 November 2025, under the supervision of Dr. Tim Molteno, who brought the final electronic components that completed the build. Thirty students from eleven universities took part in the hands-on assembly.

Read the full story: IUB launches Bangladesh's first TART →

TART is the foundation of CASSA's in-house radio observation programme and a hands-on training ground for student researchers. As part of the RAIN research area, it is a testbed for the calibration workflows, primary-beam characterisation, and data-reduction pipelines that carry directly across to far larger arrays such as LOFAR and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).