The Tufts Small Radio Telescope (SRT) is a joint SEDS and Tufts Physics and Astronomy department project to build a 3-meter radio telescope to observe the hydrogen 21 cm line. Currently under construction, it will be a public radio telescope accessible to the Tufts community for education, research, outreach, and just for fun. Users will be able to log in remotely, view live data streams, schedule an observation, view and collect their observation data, and share or export it. Instructors in astronomy, data science, and digital signal processing courses will be able to utilize the telescope and its data stream for labs, projects, or demonstrations. A long-term goal is to perform Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), a method of producing higher resolution data by correlating observations in different locations, with other universities across the country. We also hope to eventually observe pulsars which have been recently used to observe a stochastic gravitational wave background in the NSF NANOGrav collaboration. We aim to promote astronomy and astrophysics, currently a very small part of Tufts, to a larger community.
As of spring 2025, we are busy assembling the hardware and software to control the system and collect and analyze data. We are a small team of physics, astrophysics, and engineering students excited about astronomy, building, and promoting and developing science within the community. Feel free to contact us to learn more!