Design and development of a user interface to remotely control a radio telescope using virtual instruments

Radio telescopes are the main instruments used in radio astronomy. In order to encourage students of Grades K-12 to be interested in astronomy, a group of students from South Carolina State University have undertaken to computerize a 4.6 meter telescope, called Smiley. The team of students proposed to use a graphical programming language, called Laboratory Virtual Instruments Engineering Workbench (abbreviated LabVIEW) for instrumentation, data acquisition and analysis.