A group of engineering students at Iowa State is refurbishing a university-owned parabolic dish for their senior design project. When finished, the dish will be used as a radio telescope.

“We started from scratch,” said Eric Marsh, senior in electrical engineering. He said other teams started work on the project in the past but never finished.

Mike Gandrud, graduate in systems engineering, works on the project for independent study credits.

“The structure the dish is mounted to is a turret of a World War II naval gun,” Gandrud said.

He said the gear box that rotates the dish had been damaged by the elements. It weighed about 1.5 tons, and the team took it down with ropes and pulleys.

“We took off these large gear boxes that were all rusted out,” Gandrud said.

Gandrud and his brother spent more than 800 hours working on the gear box. “I basically spent every spare minute last summer doing this,” Gandrud said.

In addition to the mechanical problems of the project, there are the control and receiving aspects, Marsh said.

Radio astronomy involves tracking radio signals from objects in space while the Earth constantly rotates. Marsh said the responsibility of the control team is to write computer software that controls electrical devices that they either develop or employ.

The responsibility of the receiving team is to make the telescope useful for receiving and interpreting the signals the dish picks up, Marsh said. When a signal from a star is read, it has to be distinguished from manufactured signals and then must be interpreted into useful astronomical data.

One goal behind the project is to make the telescope an asset to the university, Marsh said.

“We want to do it right,” he said.

He said the dish will eventually be available for use by the ISU astronomy department. However, Marsh said the next senior design team to work on the project will be responsible for making the telescope easier to use.

Marsh said the team members are learning how to deal with practical problems, experience that is difficult to replicate in the classroom.

The project is funded by ISU’s Space Systems Operations Laboratory, which in turn is funded by the Iowa Space Grant Consortium, a statewide consortium of space interests funded by NASA.