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

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: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.

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: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.

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