The Allen Telescope Array, a dedicated cluster of radio telescopes dedicated to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is back in business thanks to a fund raising effort conducted by the SETI Institute.
The ATA, which was built thanks to private funding from Microsoft executive Paul Allen, was forced to shut down through lack of funding. The fund raising effort, according to Space.Com, has raised the $200,000 necessary from about 2,000 donors to reopen the facility and to recommence the search for ET's radio signals. One of the donors, coincidentally, was actress Jodi Foster, who played an astronomer who finds signals from aliens in the film "Contact," based on the novel by Carl Sagan.
SETI or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has had a long a storied history, ever since Project Ozma in 1960. SETI has been primarily a privately funded effort since NASA's effort was defunded by the Congress in the mid 1990s. The defunding of NASA's SETI was part of a wave of political attacks on big science projects in the early to mid 1990s that also terminated the Super Conducting Super Collider and almost ended the space station project.
The Allen Telescope Array consists of a 42 small dishes spread out over an area near the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 290 miles northeast of San Francisco, California. Each dish is 20 feet or 6 meters in diameter, making them relatively small. However the ATA tracks areas of the sky simultaneously to conduct radio astronomy, especially of other galaxies, as well as conducting SETI operations. It is hoped that ATA will eventually consist of 350 dishes, making it one of the most powerful radio astronomy facilities on the planet. In this way the detecting power of the small dishes, when the ATA is eventually completed, would be combined as a "phased array" to make it the equivalent of a single dish 114 meters in diameter and the angular resolution of a dish 700 meters across. The plummeting price of electronics and the relatively small size of the dishes make the ATA a nimble observatory that can track targets in the sky relatively quickly. As technology improves, the dishes, because of their relatively small size, can be more easily upgraded or replaced than a single, large dish.
Besides SETI, ATA is "--being used for radio astronomy observations of our galaxy and other galaxies, gamma ray bursts and transient radio sources, and SETI." The ATA has been in operation since 2007 and has already garnered a great deal of radio astronomy science, including radio images of a number of galaxies.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard .
