Radio-telescopes

"THALES ALENIA SPACE" charged MULTIPLAST with the manufacture of 25 composite cabin receivers for the « ALMA » scientific programme.
The cabin receivers house dish antenna making it possible to turn in any direction with great precision.
The "ALMA" (Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array) radio-telescope is a project headed up by ESO (European Southern Observatory) and comprises essentially 50 antennae 12 metres in diameter. This new generation radio-telescope has been designed to observe waves emanating from some of the coldest (several thousandths of a degree above absolute zero) and most distant objects in the universe (some 10 billion light years away).
The radio-telescopes is being installed in the Atacama desert in Chili at an altitude of more than 5000 metres and have to meet extremely strict criteria:
  • Extreme dimensional stability across a wide range of temperature variations
  • Extremely stiff
  • Light
  • Precision with assembly tolerance to within a couple of centimetres.
Carbon/epoxy composite once again turned out to be the ideal construction technique. In this particular case, a very special type of carbon with a coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) close to zero was a key factor in being able to guarantee the dimensional tolerance levels required.
For this worldwide scientific project, MULTIPLAST manufactured the carbon/epoxy toolings and produced the cabin receivers made of honeycomb/carbon/epoxy sandwich.

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