The MeerKAT telescope carried out observations of the FRB 121102 on 10 September 2019 at 03:00 UT, motivated by the source's recent activity as reported by various facilities (ATels #13064, #13073, #13090). MeerKAT performed the observations centred on 1284 MHz in the range of about 900-1670 MHz, as part of a Director’s Discretionary Time Proposal. 384 coherent beams centred on the location of the burst were formed using the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy beam former. Using the MeerTRAP real-time single pulse detection pipeline and backend, in our preliminary analysis we identified 12 repeat bursts in 3 hours of observing time. Further data analysis is ongoing. An example pulse can be seen in the link below. FRB 121102 is still active and we encourage multifrequency observations. 

The MeerKAT telescope is operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), which is a facility of the National Research Foundation, an agency of the Department of Science and Innovation. MeerTRAP acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 694745). We would like to thank the Director, the operators and SARAO for scheduling these observations.

Authors: Manisha Caleb (University of Manchester), Benjamin Stappers (University of Manchester), Ewan Barr (MPIfR), Mechiel Christiaan Bezuidenhout (University of Manchester), Laura Driessen (University of Manchester), Fabian Jankowski (University of Manchester), Michael Kramer (MPIfR), Mateusz Malenta (University of Manchester), Vincent Morello (University of Manchester), Kaustubh Rajwade (University of Manchester), Sotiris Sanidas (University of Manchester), Weiwei Chen (MPIfR), Jason Wu (MPIfR), Sarah Buchner (SARAO), Rob Fender (University of Oxford),  Lauren Rhodes (University of Oxford), Maciej Serylak (SARAO), Lee Townsend (UCT), Patrick Woudt (UCT), Julio Andrianjafy (University of Mauritius/DARA), Nalini Heeralall-Issur (University of Mauritius), Divya Hurwanth (University of Mauritius/DARA)

You can find the ATel here.