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."

Comments

Alien?

[ColdWetDog]

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.

Why?

[vlm]

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.

Re:Why?

[SETIGuy]

It's inside knowledge. I don't think it's published anywhere. My understanding is they are keeping the receivers cold and power to some systems on to preserve them. That costs some real money, and that determines how long they can stay in that state. The trade off is that you can return to operation from hibernation state fairly quickly and cheaply. Once they go to full shutdown, they'll be disassembling the telescopes and bringing critical components inside. Coming back from that state would be very expensive.

Re:Why?

[petermgreen]

One thing you learn from talking to people who work with radio astronomy is that "low noise" means different things to different people. Telecoms guys are usually satisfied with the results they can get from room temperature amplifiers. Radio astronomers are not, they run their amplifiers at liquid nitrogen or sometimes even liquid helium temperatures.

This leaves a problem if they want to shut down, if they keep the cooling systems turned on then the cooling systems keep costing money to run and maintain. If they turn the cooling systems off then they risk damage from the warm up and the following cool down.

I suspect 6 months is how long they can afford to keep the cooling etc running before they have to give up and let the system warm up

Re:Before everyone starts arguing about SETI

[SETIGuy]

Thanks. ;) Hibernation is like a warm shutdown. The receivers are kept at cryogenic temperatures and some systems are powered on. When they run out of money to pay the power bills they'll need to start disassembling things to protect sensitive parts from the elements. Which means reassembling it if they get funded. Both the disassembly and the reassembly are expensive.

Re:Much as I'm skeptical of the SETI stuff

[ethanms]

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.

For Those who Missed it.(Arial is a tricky beast)

[jellomizer]

It is Allen (A L L E N) not Alien (A L I E N)

Re:Much as I'm skeptical of the SETI stuff

[SETIGuy]

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.

Re:Don't worry, they'll find us

[vlm]

they may simply be bored and looking to travel just as we have people living in "developed" countries today who travel to various locations around the globe for benign purposes.

AKA "sex tourism"?

(sorry, couldn't resist bringing that up)

Re:ethical accountability

[SETIGuy]

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.

Well, that figures

[cdrguru]

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.

Re:Well, that figures

[ogre7299]

The VLA is not being closed, it has been substantially upgraded and is now known as the EVLA, E for expanded. The array being constructed in Chile ALMA the Atacama Large Millimeter Array operates at higher frequencies 88GHz to ~700 GHz whereas the EVLA operates between 74MHz and 50 GHz. They are complementary facilities, in addition, ALMA is a multinational project, Europe, Japan, and the US. Arecibo has been under discussion for closure for many years; however, to restore the site to its natural state (as required by contract) would cost much more than keeping it running.

Science is popular; however, progress comes slowly these days and a lot must go on behind the scenes before something of broad interest comes out. The new facilities like the EVLA, ALMA, and the Large Hadron Collider are able to make ground breaking discoveries that are difficult to achieve with more limited instrumentation.