Ryan( Marmion Academy)
Mentor: Chris Stoughton

I designed the data recording and analysis of the QuarkNet Radio Telescope, a telescope designed measure hydrogen’s emission of radio waves of around twenty-one centimeters. The telescope is meant to map the hydrogen in the arms of the Milky Way galaxy, and is composed of a two­meter disk, a feed horn configured to twenty-one centimeter waves, an Airspy receiver to collect the data and send it to the Raspberry Pi, two linear actuators to rotate the dish, and a Raspberry Pi 3 to control the Airspy and motors and to record data. We intend the QuarkNet Radio Telescope to be inexpensive enough for enterprising high school teams to repeat the procedures and build a telescope.

I created modules in the GNU Radio program with the programing language Python to average data using the Welch method and record the data to hdf5 files. To store the data, I set up a data storage system to transfer data from the Raspberry Pi 3 to the virtual server acting as a control and storage system. I then created the data analysis program using Python to display the data in a waterfall plot format.

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