IDIA is proud to announce that the CARTA team has been selected as a finalist in the Research Software Award category of the prestigious 2025/2026 NSTF-South32 Awards.
Often referred to as the “Science Oscars of South Africa”, the NSTF-South32 Awards recognise and celebrate outstanding contributions to science, engineering, technology and innovation. The awards are the country’s most comprehensive and sought-after national science awards programme.
CARTA (Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy) was shortlisted in recognition of its contribution to visualising and analysing massive radio astronomy datasets, enabling scientists worldwide to explore the universe in unprecedented detail. Developed through an international collaboration that includes IDIA, CARTA has become a world-leading visual analytics platform for radio astronomy and is now used by thousands of researchers globally.
Click here to view all the finalists in this year’s NSTF-South32 Awards
Designed to support observations from facilities including NRF-SARAO’s MeerKAT radio telescope, ALMA, the VLA, and the ASKAP radio telescope, as well as future telescopes of the SKA Observatory, CARTA allows astronomers to interact with extremely large datasets through a web browser while leveraging powerful remote computing resources. Since development began in 2018, the platform has grown into a widely adopted open-source tool that has contributed to more than 159 peer-reviewed scientific publications.
Prof Rob Simmonds, Technical Lead for CARTA, Associate Director of IDIA, and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town, will represent the CARTA team at the NSTF-South32 Award ceremony, to be held on 16 July 2026.
“CARTA is the most used visual analytics application in use by Radio Astronomers worldwide. Its current architecture was designed at IDIA, with components added by an international team. A new architecture was designed by IDIA in 2025, and is currently being implemented. This greatly extends CARTA’s capabilities as will be needed for the next generation of radio telescopes, such as the SKA.”
– Prof Rob Simmonds
The finalist recognition highlights the significant impact of research software in enabling scientific discovery and acknowledges the dedication of the international CARTA collaboration, including the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), IDIA, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the University of Alberta Department of Physics, and the Australian SKA Regional Centre (AusSRC).
We congratulate the entire CARTA collaboration on this outstanding achievement and wish the team every success in the final stage of the awards.
