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Planetary News: SETI (2007)

First Stage of Allen Telescope Array Opens for Business

October 11, 2007
A section of the Allen Telescope Array as seen on the morning of October 11, 2007
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A section of the Allen Telescope Array as seen on the morning of October 11, 2007
Credit: The SETI Institute

Today, the University of California, Berkeley and the SETI Institute announced that the first 42 radio dishes of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) are activated and collecting scientific data from the far reaches of the universe.

This is the first phase of a planned 350 radio dishes that will advance the capabilities of radio astronomy research. Paul G. Allen, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist whose foundation donated seed money that started the project in 2001, joined representatives of UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute to launch the array.

"This project represents a potential breakthrough in building large arrays of radio telescopes that are extremely cost effective," said Paul G. Allen, primary funder of the ATA. "As now deployed and with plenty of room for growth in the future, the telescope can fulfill a multitude of uses, including broad radio sky surveys and the search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology. I'm pleased to be able to contribute to such an important advancement and help build on the work this new telescope will do in the future. My hat is off to the team that worked so hard these last seven years to accomplish this significant milestone."

Unlike traditional radio telescopes which rely on a single large dish pointed at the sky, the ATA collects the signals from dozens of relatively small 6 meter dishes and combines them into a single data flow. This will enable the array to cover a much larger swath of the sky at any given time than any traditional telescope or existing arrays. For example, the ATA’s instantaneous coverage will be 17 times that of the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico.

In addition, thanks to advanced electronics the ATA will be able to listen to a much wider band of frequencies simulataneously than any existing radio telescope – the entire range between 0.5 GHz and 11.2 GHz. As a result, the ATA is able to collect and analyze more information about celestial objects than any traditional radio telescope. and do this simultaneously for several projects. In addition, observational surveys can be made with greater speed than any previous or existing radio device. These features are particularly valuable for SETI because they will make surveys of the entire sky many times faster and more efficient, and will also multiply the range of frequencies at which an intelligent signal may be detected many times over. This means that over the next two dozen-years, the array will collect 1,000 times more SETI data than has been accumulated in the past 45 years.

"For SETI, the ATA's technical capabilities exponentially increase our ability to search for intelligent signals, and may lead to the discovery of thinking beings elsewhere in the universe," said astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. "It is the first major telescope in the world built specifically for undertaking a search for extraterrestrial intelligence."

An artist's rendition of the completed ATA, with 350 dishes
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An artist's rendition of the completed ATA, with 350 dishes
Credit: Isaac Gary

The ATA opens the doors to a new era of scientific progress. The telescope's potential discoveries include a better understanding of exploding stars (supernovas), black holes, and new, exotic astronomical objects that are predicted but not yet observed. It will also provide expanded search capabilities to determine if intelligent civilizations have evolved around other stars. The ATA is the first panchromatic, wide-angle, snapshot, radio camera ever built. It is the most effective tool to create radio images of a vast area of the sky ever placed in the hands of researchers.

Located in an arid valley near the town of Hat Creek, just north of Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California, the new array is already collecting important data. The first test images, released today from data gathered by the 42 ATA telescopes, include radio maps of the nearby Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M33).

The ATA uses mass-produced, 20-foot-diameter radio dishes and commercial telecommunications technologies combined with an innovative receiver design, and state-of-the-art digital signal processing technology. Working together, these small dishes create a telescope with a wide field of view ideally suited to rapidly surveying the sky. The layout of the 42 dishes was created by a computer model and is optimized to provide high quality radio imagery of the sky. The ATA can also filter out noise from man-made interference that in many radio telescopes would render much of the data unusable. The array can be easily upgraded as new advances in computer or telecommunications technology become available.