Radio Astronomers Win Spectra

General_Corto writes: "The BBC is currently running an article about the latest global allocations of EM spectrum for radio astronomy. The entire range from 75GHz to 275Ghz has been given to them alone, which should ensure that all their readings are free from earth-based interference. Apparently, "there is more energy at millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths washing through the Universe than there is of light or any other kind of radiation." Hopefully all those little green men out there use cellphones in that frequency range." You may also be interested in the home pages of the International Telecommunications Union and the International Astronomical Union.

Comments

The first radio amateurs ..

[geirt]

This reminds me of the first radio amateurs. They where assigned all frequencies above 300 kHz (wavelength shorter than 1 km) because the frequency was so high that (it was believed at that time) "the radio waves propagates as light" and thus could not pass any obstacles like trees, buildings and the horizon.....

It could not have been more wrong, and today the radio amateurs are crammed into small segments scattered all over the RF spectrum.

As soon as there is any legitimate need for these frequencies, I am sure that the history repeats.

Not about little green men

[BeeJay]

Most comments on this story are about search for E.T.

Have you read the article? I find nothing indicating that search for extraterrestial life is the intend of keeping those frequencies clear.

It's about radio astronomy. To me, that means exploring the space, the stars, the galaxies, etc.

Some comments indicate that we shouln't explore farther away than our solar system, because we will never go longer anyway... I think you totally miss the point of atronomy. It's not about "preparing a trip to mars", it's rather about exploring the world we live in - find out how things are, how nature works, and so on. The best and most useful results of science are often those of research that didn't have any really practical purpurse, but that is rather based on curiosity.

While the more practical research is about finding "the answers", you could say that real research is about finding the relevant questions to ask.

(I'm not an astronomer - although a Physics minor and Mathematics major.)

Why Radio astronomers need protected wavelengths

[tjwhaynes]

IWARA - I Was A Radio Astronomer!

For all of you unadventurous souls who seem to believe that giving specific wavebands to astronomy is a waste (and yes I am aware that the article merely points out that the current astronomy wavelengths are going to remain protected) I think I ought to explain why radio astronomy can't function without this protection. Here's a little demonstration:

Put your pen on the floor - a bic biro will do. Lift it above your head. You have just used up more energy than the entire collection of radio telescopes on the surface of the earth has ever collected from the sky. The base unit of energy for most radio astronomers is the Jansky - often written Jy - which is equivalent to 10^{-26} W m^{-2}. Most of the radio objects in the sky have intensities of less than 1 Jy. A few reach up into kJy.

Now consider a mobile phone. These stick out a few watts of energy. So they are about 26 orders of magnitude more powerful than the average radio source appears in the sky.

Any terrestrial transmitter dwarfs the emissions we get from the sky by design. For communications, the radio emissions are background noise to be squashed under the signal. If we are to further our understanding of physics, and radio astronomy provides a unique testing crucible to test the theories against, we need protected bandwidth.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Effect on Amateur Radio

[wolfson]

As a Tech Plus Amateur Radio liscense from the FCC i wonder how this will affect us. As a license holder i have allready been promissed access to some of these frequecys. Does this decison overrule thoses. I am now not allowed to use them. And how does a single international organization have control over this process of distributing banwith. Seems like a mighty large chunk to one group.

Scott Wolf
Network Administrator
AGINET
admin@aginet.com

Irony

[Hard_Code]

We have all sorts of encryption and compression to keep our wireless communications secure...to aliens we must just seem like line noise...

Re:One way glass?

[EricWright]

The reason we watch at these frequencies is that the Earth's atmosphere is transparent to radiation at those frequencies. There's no reason to perform searches at frequencies that won't get through the atmosphere (like particular UV frequencies, except when there's a hole in the ozone!)

Unless the little green men have a vastly different ecology (not carbon based, don't require oxygen/water, etc. and thus a wildly different atmosphere) it is very likely that they are searching the same frequencies as we are.

That would suck!

Eric

What a waste of bandwidth.

[Lita Juarez]

I feel really angry about this. Bandwidth is an already scarce resource, and for them to waste a full 200GHz for this sort of research seems criminal. As the demand for wireless telecommunications for consumer use continues to boom, it seems crazy that they are devoting such a large slice of the spectrum to what will probably be fruitless research. A small number of astronomers will benefit from this move, at the expense of the rest of the world's population. Does this seem fair or reasonable?

The BBC article says "It is a win for science". This is a very naive attitude. It is a win for astronomy, nothing more. Surely science would benefit more if governments were to fund their scientists properly - astronomy is just a very small branch of science, and is a branch of science which does little to address the world's problems. This is just a token attempt by the governments of the world to try to show their commitment to science.

Re:What a waste of bandwidth.

[Anonymous Coward]

As the demand for wireless telecommunications for consumer use continues to boom, [...] A small number of astronomers will benefit from this move, at the expense of the rest of the world's population. Does this seem fair or reasonable?

Your whining is disgusting. So astronomers will benefit "at the expense of the rest of the world's population", huh? Most of the rest of the world's population couldn't care about dastardly astronomers stealing bandwidth from wireless communication. Most of them care a lot more about what they're going to eat tomorrow. Why aren't you complaining about telecomm companies and their clients benefiting at the expense of the rest of the world's population? If the only issue at hand is "benefit to the most people", doesn't it seem more fair or reasonable that the small fraction of the world's population who would use wireless could live with good old-fashioned wired communications and take the money they'd have spent on wireless to do something that really would benefit the rest of the world's population?

That being said: yes, I think it's fair and reasonable for astronomers to use bandwidth to learn about our universe, and then tell us about it. Knowledge doesn't just benefit those who are producing it; it benefits everyone who seeks it.

Moreover, if the only thing people cared about was personal convenience, then there's no point in having civilization. Civilization is supposed to remove the necessity of having every single person spending their entire lives in survival, so that people can spend time doing non-essential things. Art, history, literature, music, philosophy, science. Those are the standards against which civilization is measured, not one's ability to hold a phone conversation or check e-mail outdoors. Good grief.

Besides, I don't even see this as impacting wireless telecomm very much. The spectrum is still large, and there is still a great deal of room for technology to improve. Anyway, the telecomm companies are rich. Why don't they buy the bandwidth back from the radio astronomers, in exchange for setting up some radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon? I expect that a hundred billion trillion tons of rock would do a pretty good job of shielding stray radio emissions from the Earth.

Re:What a waste of bandwidth.

[Nicolas MONNET]

Nice comeback; it must feel much better to claim to be trolling than to admit that you're too stupid to know the difference between astrology and astronomy. :

Re:What a waste of bandwidth.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bandwidth is an already scarce resource,

Is it? I believe the 500-1000 GHz frequency range is still free. So is most of the the 10-10000THz range. and then there's all the 10 Hz and lower frequencies.

It isn't all about LGM

[HiyaPower]

One of the prime uses for radio astronomy is earth weather. Water vapor has a spectrl line at 22.235 GHz and 117 GHz (and up). Oxygen has a complex of lines around 50 GHz. By picking your frequencies carefully and being clever with your processing, you can tell the vertical temperature distribution of the atmosphere as well as water content. Also, the microwave emission quality of the ocean varies with wind speed. Again you can tell something about it. Snow pack depth is also something that you can monitor in the spectral region. Since most of the earth is covered by water, and infra-red does not penetrate cloud tops well, remote sensing by microwaves has help immensely with the ability to forcast weather in the past 20 years. All we need is for some commercial interests to blow the spectrum out of the water in order to broadcast a bazzilion channels of the latest WWF tag team.

This article is bogus

[hpa]

This Slashdot article is completely bogus. The quoted article says:

WRC 2000 has protected for science all the frequencies between 71 and 275 gigahertz that radio astronomers currently use.

Translation: the radio astronomy allocations in the 71-275 GHz band was not diminished. This is a far cry from claiming that over 200 GHz of EHF spectrum (of which there is 270 GHz in total) would be allocated solely to radio astronomy.

Re:Is there no future?

[MikeFM]

Dunno. I can't think of hearing it w/ the future part tacked on from anyone else so maybe it came from my head or maybe I'm just tired and can't remember. Do you think I can patent it? LOL

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

[Detritus]

Read the article:

WRC 2000 has protected for science all the frequencies between 71 and 275 gigahertz that radio astronomers currently use. They have added more than 90 GHz of spectrum to the 44 GHz already set aside for their use in this frequency range.

Radio astronomers have been given some new allocations, but not the entire 71-275 GHz frequency range. Allocating all of that range to radio astronomy would be a disaster for research, experimentation and other users of the RF spectrum.

Re:Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

[dublin]

This is all about money, not science. Sure, the radio astronomers would like to have all the high-end frequencies, and probably will for a number of years, but the band they got in this deal is low enough that it could easily be commercially usable in several years.

At that point, it'll be worth countless billions, and you can bet they'll be trying to shake down the ".rad's" in excahnge for "giving up" their RF turf. This is *very* bad for the future of always-on, always available high-speed wireless networking and it's a horrible deal for everyone but the astronomers. It's not a problem now because those frequencies are not yet commercially viable - but they *will* be.

(I used Motorola's 18 GHz LAN back in the early 90's. Other than sub-optimal wall penetration, these high frequencies work well - and more importantly, there's a *TON* of bandwidth up there, and as Shannon taught us, you can trade bandwidth for power.)

Evolution of Life

[Digitalia]

Through the years, nature has developed two means of propagation: saturation and specification. While most fauna are specific in their intent, flora opt for the easier of the two. A dandelion does not release one seed into a SSW vector. It's species would have gone extinct long ago if it had. Instead, it releases a gross of seeds into the wind. Perhaps we need to do the same. Concentrating on radio alone will get us no where. We will go extinct before we meet an alien species. I am a proponent of sending out beacons. Launch a thousand small craft with a solar sails towards the most promising targets. On board is a cache of data on humanity, and a radio transmitter.

Continue to scan the skies with our antennas, but in a universe of so many stars, and so many planets, a proactive solution is the only one that will work.

One way glass?

[MikeFM]

Hrm.. if we have that whole range of easy to see signals blocked off so we can see any lil green men sending in that range I guess we're not sending anything out at that range. What if the lil green men decided that this was an optimal range to watch also so they aren't sending anything out either. We're each sitting behind a one-way mirror trying to see the other but evidently only seeing the blank reflection of our own window. :)

Re:Contact

[Nexx]

I wonder what the point of looking for ET is

Radioastronomy isn't *just* about looking for ET; it's also about looking at the fundamantal structure of matter itself. There are many phenomenons in space (like the supernova) that're either difficult or simply impossible, with today's technology, to recreate. Studying these will give us valuable "basic science" that may, one day, become usable technology.

Re:Is there no future?

[michael.creasy]

Realisticly though, the only space we are going to explore is in our own solar system so we should concentrate our efforts here.
Yes, I'd like to see a man on Mars and I'd like to go to the moon, but isn't radio astronomy unnecessary for this "short" distance ?

Is there no future?

[MikeFM]

Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it, those who ignore the future are just doomed. Sure it may seem like a total waste of time and money to watch and explore space but most discoveries are made when you are least expecting them. If you aren't paying attention then it might blow past you and you'll never realize what you missed. There will come a point when this planet will be destroyed, either by our own foolishness or by some outside force. If we haven't colonized space by then then poof the human race is gone. Remember all those asteroid movies a couple years ago? :) Don't put all your eggs in one basket, sure another basket might cost more but it provides you extra protection. Just imagine life as needing RAID protection. :)

Good News

[KjetilK]

This is extremely good news for science! Electromagnetic pollution is the most serious threat to astronomy today, both in the optical and at other wavelenghts. Then, there is all the garbage out there. For more information about this issue, please visit International Dark-Sky Association.

Now, it is not protected primarily for SETI. Submm is an extremely important branch of astronomy, and gaining. The page of the largest submm telescope in the world the JCMT is a good place to start if you want to find out more about submm astronomy.

As for SETI funding, there are not huge amounts of resources going into it. There are small amounts of resources. IMHO, that is the way it should be, but piggyback projects should be conducted. Computing is best done through distributed projects, like the SETI@Home project. I have stopped running the client, though, I think they're not managing the project right.

Re:Contact

[michael.creasy]

There are many phenomenons in space (like the supernova) that're either difficult or simply impossible, with today's technology, to recreate

Good, the idea of some guy in a lab recreating a supernova is not my idea of fun, what they do at CERN is good enough.