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Allen Telescope Array Shut Down
SETIGuy writes "The Allen Telescope Array has been put into hibernation due to lack of funds to continue operations. Most of the technical staff have been laid off or moved to other projects. It's too early to call it closed, but the hibernation state can only last for 6 months or so before a full shutdown is necessary. Coming back from a full shutdown would be expensive. It's unfortunate that the telescope never received the funding to build the 350 dish antennas that would make it a world class instrument. In its current 42-antenna state, it is not a significant enough improvement over other telescopes to attract enough funding to keep operating."
How will this affect the search for intelligent space allens?
Well, I read it as the "Alien Telescope" and started to wonder if funding problems were universal, so to speak. Then I looked it up - Alien telescope is actually pretty close, but it's named after Paul Allen (the Microsoft Billionaire that has his own submarine, etc).
Reality sucks most of the time.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It would only be fair to point out that this array wasn't just looking for little green men. It was also doing a lot of mainstream survey that could actually prove useful. I suspect its association with SETI is one of the reasons it's had a tough time--as it's made it more a "fringe" project than it needed to be and overshadowed the other survey work it was doing.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Maybe they should try putting cats into orbit?
It's too early to call it closed, but the hibernation state can only last for 6 months or so before a full shutdown is necessary. Coming back from a full shutdown would be expensive.
Can anyone find the quote above anywhere other than /., and/or explain why?
I've spent a substantial number of years tangentially involved with production telecom microwave dishes and also ham radio microwave stuff. I don't know of any inherent technological limitation relating to 6 months... Maybe they mean something calendar based, like no snow removal in October means the dishes have to come down before they smashed down? Its not like lichen will colonize the LNAs or the support arms grow like untrimmed trees or any other inherent technological limitation. Maybe the next site rent payment (real rent or property tax) is due in 6 months and its pay up or hit the streets.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Instead of plowing untold amounts of money in a megalomaniacal and useless pursuit of "retiring on Mars", here's a real, practical project to fund! Unless he meant he'll retire with the money he'll make with Mars shenanigans.
Clearly nobody else thought Contact was a good enough movie to fund it IRL
S.E.T.I. stuff aside, there's still science to be done, and this Telescope Array is an asset waiting to be utilized. Always sad to see useful technology go to waste...
How much more project infrastructure in the US is going to be abandoned? Is the US really trying to give up on being the R&D front-runner on the planet? Might be a bit exaggerated, but it's not far off the mark is it.
/rant
Just donated to SETI.org hopefully the money will help a bit.
Before everyone starts arguing about the merit of SETI, I should point out that SETI was only one small part of what this telescope would have done. I would estimate that less that 5% of the observations made were SETI related.
But, unfortunately, with only 42 dishes, the ATA was outclassed by other telescopes for most any purpose for which it was used. Even in SETI observation, the Arecibo telescope is more sensitive, and has a wider simultaneous field of view. The Green Bank Telescope also has a larger field of view covers, the same range of sky, and has about the same sensitivity. If ATA had been completed, it would have had much better sensitivity (although still a tiny field of view). I won't guess at Paul Allen's motivation in not funding further construction.
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... needs to match his long time friend's funding.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Why are we trying to find aliens? Any race that gets to the top must be a murderous race, and aliens are no exceptions.
Geez, mods these days have no sense of humor.
The U.S. doesn't even care about illegal aliens - let alone extraterrestrial ones.
I guess the space aliens didn't grease the palms of the "intelligent" politicians.
If money is the problem, tell the scientists to declare war on them, there seems to be more taxpayer funded loot for war than ever.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Well, that's one opinion. And nobody is stopping you from giving your hard earned money to solve these problems.
It is Allen (A L L E N) not Alien (A L I E N)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Where's your innovation now? Destroyed by the angry hoardes of dissatisified and unhappy tea-partiers. Unhappy that they were too ignorant to not ruin their own lives, they seek to ensure that the rest of America feels their pain.
How about this America? Stop waging war and stop listening to these bitter-never-have-beens, how about you actually do something heroic.
This Arial is Alien to me too.
Can't they get by on 42? That ought to be enough to answer any questions about life, the universe, and uh, you know... whatever else...
What are you babbling about, two most powerful optical telescopes are Keck in Hawaii and Hubble in space. Most powerful IR telescope is Spitzer, U.S. owned and operated. Fermi gamma ray telescope, by NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Sweden. Then there's the Atacama in Chile which will be the most power radio telescope, funded by the U.S., Canada, EU and Japan.
ATA operations cost about $1.5 million per year, Pierson said, and the SETI science campaign at ATA costs another $1 million annually.
So, 20 years of operation cost about the same as one extra F/A-18E/F? Nice.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
how much money was wasted till they came to this conclusion. Nobody cares about the sound of stars, even if there is life on other planets we can't get to them or communicate with them, SETI is a colossal waste of resources. How about we solve our own world's problems first before wasting money wondering what's out in space.
Do you watch TV? Go to movies? Play video games? Listen to music? Why do you spend your money in such an irresponsible, unethical and morally questionable manner when we haven't eradicated certain issues that plague humanity such as poverty, illiteracy, poor or no education, using non-renewable as well as environmentally disruptive and destructive fuels, etc. You have no business wasting money on entertainment until we've done so.
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I can only think about the massive lawsuit Mr. Allen attempted last year was
to be a further fund arm for projects like this.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20025438-37.html
Ok, Google, you have Google Sky, you got out of a stupid lawsuit, here's ..... good project!
a tax writ
the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Since all it would take is just one alien species, capable of building a self-replicating robot ship, to populate the entire galaxy with probes in the astronomical blink of an eye, I'd say that there is likely another species out there shielding us from the discovery. Either that of there is no one else. In both cases, searching for signs of intelligent life is going to be a waste of time and money.
Some film studio could buy it up and use it for making a movie about a message from ET's
VLA is being shut down soon, I think sometime in 2012 . It is perhaps going to be replaced by an array in Chile.
Aricebo is being shut down as well.
Sort of makes sense that we wouldn't build a real replacement in the US an even if we did, it would get shut down as well.
Frankly, nobody is all that interested. There are much more interesting things to spend money on than science, things that people watching American Idol want to hear about. The few people that might be interested in science, well, they are just nerds anyway and don't count.
Science just isn't all that popular.
If the instrument cannot attract funding it is time to phase it out. We can't keep running all scientific instruments ever built, even if scientific staff would like us to do so. As new and more powerful instruments are installed, resources have to be shifted over.
Maybe Paul Allen realized that the Fermi Paradox was worth pondering. The late Michael Crichton gave a speech titled "Aliens cause global warming" at Cal Tech in 2003 (Read it here http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122603134258207975.html) I found it educational. Not that doing the research was a bad idea, but after forty years we should have detected something more conclusive than the "wow" event. It means that there are no signals to detect (either they don't exist or are so attenuated that they cannot be detected) or that there is some flaw in our approach to detecting the signal.
Has anybody considered that these 'off-the-shelf' TVRO dishes (albeit professional grade) were supposed to be inexpensive ?
They spent over $1M each on them. Perhaps a more frugal payroll would have brought more charitable contributions. Maybe some follow-on funding from Mr Allen ? There are rumors of Seti Institute has had some questionable ethics when dealing with the Haughton-Mars project on Devon Island.
Interesting that they are one of the sponsored organizations for the Google Summer of Code. I guess we only have to wait a few hours to find out if any talented students will get awarded the chance to work on this since Seti Institute was mentoring a couple of projects
Unbelievable moderator abuse of a low low 4-digit UID. I've seen far lamer lulz go +5 funny.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
We can afford bombing sorties over Libya. Thanks Barry (aka GWB III). And you suckas thought he was anti-war.
A short history of Arial...
boss: Design a font called "Arial".
designer: I would like to call it "Arlal".
boss: No. Arial.
designer: Ok (but I'll make i look as much as possible like l, asshole!)
I work on a telescope that uses helium-based refrigeration systems like these, and they don't keep running more than a few months without maintenance. The displacer seals get worn out, and things go south fast.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Can we use a lot of Sat TV dishes to replace a large dish in urban area and filter the result programmatically? Like processing signal from a microphone array? Each dish equipped with motorized gear, GPS, a 5MP camera. GPS gives coordinate, camera takes picture of the night sky it is pointing toward.
That is unfortunate. Howerver for $50 m they could have had fewer conventional 12 meter antennas that require fewer feeds and less correlation equipment, plus there would be higher reliability due to lower critical part counts, and each dish would supply 4 times the collection area and twice the gain. What was built could have been done with 11 each 12 meter antennas, or 3 each 25 meter antennas (17 times the collection area and over 4 times the gain per antenna). There are no magic potions in antenna design, in small antennas, the costs are dominated by the electronic systems, servo instrumentation and RF systems, which are also the most unreliable, so moving to small and many has the inevitable result you see. Sometimes bigger is better. Instead, the Allen Array founders wanted to reinvent the wheel, and as a result they lost the opportunity do do science. Perhaps the array goals would have been different with fewer antennas, but if three 25 meter antennas were built, people would be bidding for rights to use them, each of which can be used as a stand alone radio telescope. At 6 meters, they are not practical.