Control System Design for a Small-Scale Radio Telescope: A Senior Design Project

This paper presents the management of a student-led initiative to launch an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) award-winning small-scale radio telescope as a senior design project. This challenge provided the students with the opportunity to develop their skills in project management as well as demonstrate and hone their technical abilities in their field. The project involved in-depth research, short-term and long-term goal development with stakeholders, component specification, project funding requests, multidisciplinary team coordination for concurrent and future aspects of the project, and the transfer of the project and documentation to new student teams. While many are familiar with looking at the stars with an optical telescope, they provide a limited perspective of the universe. Radio telescopes expand our access to aspects of the universe beyond the visible spectrum, including pulsars and imaging black holes. To establish the foundation for this new project, this team took on the design of the control of the pointing system of a radio telescope. This control system employs a microcontroller-based electronic system to orient a 3-meter dish antenna for taking measurements. The system's primary objective is to create a layer of abstraction to allow simple directional control from the main computer using the altitude and azimuth coordinate system. This project gave the students invaluable experience in managing a complex project over several months. Through the implementation of the project, students learned skills such as scheduling design and testing time based on vendor timelines and other commitments, acquiring and allocating funding, and regularly updating key stakeholders in the student astronomy and electrical engineering clubs, as well as the involved faculty. The resulting radio telescope project provides university undergraduate students with the ability to learn the basics of radio astronomy through the easily accessible small-scale radio telescope system.