Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
The SETI Institute's main efforts recently have used this telescope. Those are shut down. SETI efforts unrelated to the ATA (Berkeley, Harvard, JPL, Greenbank, etc) are unaffected.
Support SETI@home
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
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.
Support SETI@home
But I wonder if it wasn't too concentrated to make it a world class device, even if it did get built out to the full compliment.
Can't you do just as much with fewer dishes by organizing them into a very long baseline array?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
... 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.
Apace Allens, much like our own Earth-based Illegal-Allens, will simply continue to exist without drawing notice from the public, or even the scientific community.
I called INS the other day on a guy at work, but it turned out he was an Alan, and they don't accept those for deportation...
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.
What is to skeptical about when it comes to SETI? I mean, do you doubt the existence of ET intelligence? The current programs ability to find them? Or do you question the current desire of some to find them?
Now... if you want to doubt the current programs that's one thing... looking simply at radio waves is a narrow focus based on what we currently believe to be the best way to transmit information in our particular place. In 200 years we might look at the concept of radio transmission in the same way that today we look at the concept of using drums or smoke signals for communication... slow data rate, limited range, etc...
But each time you look up at that sky realize that some of those dots are not actually suns... they are entire GALAXIES of suns. With millions of potential star systems why is it so difficult to believe that some of them might contain a civilization that is at a point which is equal to or far greater then our current current state of technology and may in fact be transmitting something we can "hear"? ...and if it's because "we're too far to bother", imagine if people had said that back in the days of sailing ships and horses... the desire to travel great distances in the shortest possible time has pushed for some amazing discoveries.
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.
I don't think that picture is to scale on dish size. I think the runway is at least 3000 feet long and 60 feet wide. The dishes are much smaller than what's shown.
The goal with ATA was to use small inexpensive dishes to get about 10,000 m^2 of collecting area. To get the best interferometry you want to use a wide variety of baselines. Short spacing give large structure. Long spacings give you small scale structure. Without a large number of baselines you have a hard time getting absolute intensities of structures. With regularly spaced arrays, such as the VLA, intensities are often normalized to single dish measurements. Most of the time VLBI is used only for positional information (i.e. to measure the parallax and proper motion of a pulsar) rather than intensity information and only gives information along the axis perpendicular to the baseline of the telescopes used.
ATA was a tradeoff between expense, difficulty of routing signal fibers, available land, collecting area, and angular resolution. Had it been fully built, it would be an amazing instrument.
Support SETI@home
Very few of those dots are galaxies, maybe six if you went all over the world and looked at the sky far from cities....the human eye can only see Andromeda and a few bright companions of the Milky Way.
It could very well be that multi-cellular life is unique to Earth, or intelligent life is. Life itself might be due to peculiar unique thing to earth, perhaps the accident that made our moon and mars.
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.
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.
Support SETI@home
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
What is to skeptical about when it comes to SETI? I mean, do you doubt the existence of ET intelligence? The current programs ability to find them? Or do you question the current desire of some to find them?
I'm skeptical that radio searches are the way to find them. I believe that due to the shear number of galaxies and stars out there, that the one in a trillion chance of life must have been repeated many times so it's very likely that ET intelligent life exists.
However, we're already seeing why leaking radio waves are not going to find any ET's - in the hundred years since radio was invented, we are well on our way with replacing high powered analog transmitters with much lowered powered digital and spread spectrum transmissions -- transmissions that sound much like random static if you don't know what you're listening to.
There's a very small likelihood that an intelligent society that may have developed a millions of years ago is still in their 100 year "analog radio" timeframe so we can intercept their communications.
It's possible that some alien society is sending out radio beacons to announce their presence (and maybe even transmitting the plans to a time/space travel device that we can build to reach them), but I'm a little skeptical that this would be the case, again because whatever window of time that they'd feel like announcing their presence wouldn't match up with when we are listening since our societies may be millions or billions of years apart in development.
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.
That "travel farther in less time" thing is hitting walls all over the place.
It's not a matter of serendipitous engineering discoveries, sweat equity, and balls any more.
You're going to have to find a new branch of physics that allows such travel.
As for why haven't they visited? Well, have you actually checked out the livingroom of every dust mite in your mattress? Gone out of your way to commune with the coyotes who live on the other side of the hill you drive by on your commute? Put 3/4ths of your planetary productivity into developing and launching a mission to our nearest star?
They aren't here because they probably have no idea we're here. Even if our faintest signals could be seen out in space, they're only about 100 light-years away. About a 15,000 stars in that envelope. And they're probably not tuning into AM radio looking for signals at -500 dbm. in our direction. We're out here in the galactic boonies, and they'll be looking primarily towards the galactic center. So only that small sliver of the spheroid that is farther out than we are will have much chance of looking our way at all.
What are the chances 100 stars have someone likely to see us who are ready to visit us within a century?
Some film studio could buy it up and use it for making a movie about a message from ET's
Andromeda's a smudge, not a dot. And you can't see it from a city. At least not one whose power grid hasn't been recently bombed out.
Honestly, I think you have that assessment backwards.
SETI is less practical than a Mars mission. And far less likely to succeed in Musk's lifetime.
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.
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
It's actually disappointing, how few stars there are in the sky that can be seen, two or three thousand at any one time under the most ideal conditions. Suppose that the chances of intelligent life are on average one per milky-way sized galaxy, then each such planet would be essentially alone and never able to communicate with another and would forever be unaware of the other's existence.
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.
Ah, Dear Sir Patrick Moore... Has he stopped being a misogynist? My share of reverence disappeared after reading his various comments regarding women. He's a relic of the 1900s, not even 20th Century. I hope he retires from public life soon without further damaging himself.
Last night from the little town I live 30 miles out of London I could only see the major constellations. Everything else was washed out by the light sources.
The Campaign for Dark Skies is doing excellent work here in UK, eventually one day we will have sensible lighting all around us.
In most curriculums Astronomy 101 deals with the planets of the Solar System. Not a lot of talk about galaxies until Astronomy 102 ;).
All in all though, I recently saw one of the head researchers of the SETI project at a presentation, and he seemed very level headed about the whole thing. He was completely open to the idea that ET might not be out there at all, or might be too far, or their methods may be flawed in such a way that we'd never detect them using the methods that SETI currently employs.
It all basically boils down to one thing though: what if that isn't the case? If you only limit yourself to ventures which have certainty of success, then we're in for a very boring future. SETI's a gamble. We take a look, we what (if anything) is out there, and if it's not successful, then oh well. We tried.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
So what? Are we already at the point in the U.S. where research must yield a product and quickly or its considered "liburul" and meaningless?
I guess I don't want to know the answer to that.
It seems we're already at a point with research where 1) it has to be a money maker and quick or 2) some rich dude can put his name on it or claim they did it in some monomaniacal way.
anything that can be unscrewed will be sold for quick cash.
Look what local governments are doing... selling off the infrastructure for fast bucks.
We're at a point in the economy where frivolity is frivolity and earnest but overstated arguments about its worth to humanity need to be ignored in favor of budgeting according to utility.
I can still remember the night about 10 years ago when they powered-up the lighting on just one brand-new automobile dealership 4 miles from my house, and half the stars that were there the night before, weren't there any more.
I can also remember lying on my back on a beach in the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, seeing the sky the way every human used to see it, and seeing everything around me castng sharp shadows just from starlight.
We could actually see at night, until we started using light to see by.