HUGE RADIO TELESCOPE MADE WITH COAT HANGER TECH

Builders of the biggest radio telescope in the world, the Square Kilometer Array, are borrowing techniques from the makers of shopping carts and coat hangers to stay in the project's budget.

The radio telescope is made up of 3,000 radio dishes and several million non-dish antenna elements located in two different countries -- one array in South Africa and the other in Australia. Each array will be arranged in five sprial arms, extending out to distances of 3,000 kilometers from a center, and are being built to detect electromagnetic radiation emitted by objects in space.

Construction of the arrays will start in 2016 and is expected to be completed by 2024. The product development company, Cambridge Consultants, needs to build each antennae for less than 75 euros (U.S. $92) for a total budget of 1.5 billion euro or U.S. $1.84 billion. But back when they starting pricing out the original prototypes for the antennas, the cost was too high. That's because precision antennas used for astronomy are custom-designed, rather than mass-produced. They have to be the right shape and size to reduce background noise, pick up faint signals and work in relatively narrow frequency bands.

To stay within budget, Cambridge Consultants and the organizations building the SKA looked to the makers of coat hangers and shopping carts, as well as television aerials. Their mass productions techniques made efficient use of metal during manufacturing, bringing down the cost.

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