TAROT (French: Télescope à Action Rapide pour les Objets Transitoires, "Quick-action telescope for transient objects") is a project of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) aimed at rapidly reacting to particular data from other astronomical surveying facilities to monitor for and registering fast changing astronomical objects and phenomena.
[1] The TAROT-South facility is a 25 cm very fast moving optical robotic telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Able to accelerate at 120°/s2 to a top speed of 80°/s, it can begin observing within 1–1.5 seconds[2] of being notified by a gamma-ray telescope that a gamma-ray burst is in progress and can provide fast and accurate positions of transient events within seconds.
In addition to its own observations, an important purpose of the telescope is to find an accurate source location.
It is a duplicate of the original TAROT telescope located at the Calern observatory, in France.