Hi, I work for the Radio Astronomy Lab at UC Berkeley, which is the group that runs the Hat Creek Radio Observatory. When the observatory was founded in the 1950's, the primary consideration was radio quietness. The location is in somewhat of a natural bowl, geologically speaking, sheilding it from a lot of radio noise, but by no means all (reflections from airport radars can be seen off of Mt Lassen and Mt Shasta just to name one from many sources).
We already have the infrastructure there, so, it makes sense to build more telescopes there. The primary cost of building has nothing to do with the real estate. Leasing more land from local land owners is a small part of the cost (an extremely small one).
The physical maintenance of the antennas should not be taken lightly. With 350 of them planned for the future, at least a few, perhaps a dozen will be down for maintenance work everyday. We've already done work to streamline the process of building (one antenna a day is the goal). Plus, we simply don't have the money to do one big construction push.
For those comparing to the VLA, the cost of construction for the VLA was about $78 million dollars in ~1975 dollars (http://www.rozylowicz.com/retirement/vla/very-lar ge-array.html). Adjusting for the changes in currency valuation, that's approximately $285million in 2005 dollars (using http://www.bls.gov/cpi/home.htm to adjust). Note, that does not include the costs to research and design the system, which was many more millions.
So far, the ATA has cost less than $20million and at completion should be more capable than the VLA in many ways and cost about 90% less to build.
And, it's primary mission is to do science with SETI operations piggybacking on the surveys taking place.
You are severely underestimating the total data needs of the system. For the ATA to do the best interference mitigation that it can do, the correlator would peak at about 194GB/sec of data throughput. We won't push the correlator to do that for many reasons, but even a data rate of say 100MB/sec means that a possibly typical observation for 4 minutes would consume 24GBytes. As you might imagine, a data feed that could transport a constant 100MB/sec away from the observatory would be prohibitively expensive.
We've been discussing making the ATA an imaging instrument, in that the raw data is thrown away after a much smaller and easier to handle "image" is generated. These sorts of design considerations will also flow into the upcoming Square Kilometer Array. To do this imaging may require a small beowulf cluster.
So, yes, you are underestimating the size of the station wagon needed.
And finally, the RAL is a teaching institution, fully part of the astronomy department of UC Berkeley. This means we want undergrads/grads/postdocs/researchers to have access to the site and it be a teaching environment, which means that the telescopes are not just built in the middle of nowhere, to be left alone producing data in the quiet wilderness.
P.S. Using the CPI conversion for your parents house cost of $37,000 in "the 70's" (I'll use 1975 again), the equivilent amount in 2005 dollars is: $135,068.87.
I work for the Radio Astronomy Lab at UC Berkeley which is building the ATA with the SETI institute.
The ATA was once called the One Hectere Array (1HT) and wasn't originally intended to be part of a SETI project. Once SETI sold the idea (along with the RAL) to the Allen Foundation, funding was approved. It's important to note that making arrays is not a manufacturing problem. It is mostly one of research. As technology progresses, the tools for doing science must be re-evaluated and if something cheaper/better or slightly more expensive/better comes along, it slows down the process of building.
The ATA has been in an R&D mode for many years and the new set of dishes being brought online is the columination of all the work done for it over the last 10-15 years. The VLA was a concept on a drawing board many years before it was built.
The cost for building has almost nothing to do with real estate prices. Most of the land was already under the control of UC of Cal, and the rest has been under lease from local land owners since the 1950's. Also, Hat Creek is a very radio quiet area. Radio quiet being a harder thing to come by year after year.
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Hi, I work for the Radio Astronomy Lab at UC Berkeley, which is the group that runs the Hat Creek Radio Observatory. When the observatory was founded in the 1950's, the primary consideration was radio quietness. The location is in somewhat of a natural bowl, geologically speaking, sheilding it from a lot of radio noise, but by no means all (reflections from airport radars can be seen off of Mt Lassen and Mt Shasta just to name one from many sources).
r ge-array.html). Adjusting for the changes in currency valuation, that's approximately $285million in 2005 dollars (using http://www.bls.gov/cpi/home.htm to adjust). Note, that does not include the costs to research and design the system, which was many more millions.
y
We already have the infrastructure there, so, it makes sense to build more telescopes there. The primary cost of building has nothing to do with the real estate. Leasing more land from local land owners is a small part of the cost (an extremely small one).
The physical maintenance of the antennas should not be taken lightly. With 350 of them planned for the future, at least a few, perhaps a dozen will be down for maintenance work everyday. We've already done work to streamline the process of building (one antenna a day is the goal). Plus, we simply don't have the money to do one big construction push.
For those comparing to the VLA, the cost of construction for the VLA was about $78 million dollars in ~1975 dollars (http://www.rozylowicz.com/retirement/vla/very-la
So far, the ATA has cost less than $20million and at completion should be more capable than the VLA in many ways and cost about 90% less to build.
And, it's primary mission is to do science with SETI operations piggybacking on the surveys taking place.
You are severely underestimating the total data needs of the system. For the ATA to do the best interference mitigation that it can do, the correlator would peak at about 194GB/sec of data throughput. We won't push the correlator to do that for many reasons, but even a data rate of say 100MB/sec means that a possibly typical observation for 4 minutes would consume 24GBytes. As you might imagine, a data feed that could transport
a constant 100MB/sec away from the observatory would be prohibitively expensive.
We've been discussing making the ATA an imaging instrument, in that the raw data is thrown away after a much smaller and easier to handle "image" is generated. These sorts of design considerations will also flow into the upcoming Square Kilometer Array.
To do this imaging may require a small beowulf cluster.
So, yes, you are underestimating the size of the station wagon needed.
And finally, the RAL is a teaching institution, fully part of the astronomy department of UC Berkeley. This means we want undergrads/grads/postdocs/researchers to have access to the site and it be a teaching environment, which means that the telescopes are not just built in the middle of nowhere, to be left alone producing data in the quiet wilderness.
For more info on the array, check out the wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_telescope_arra
P.S. Using the CPI conversion for your parents house cost of $37,000 in "the 70's" (I'll use 1975 again), the equivilent amount in 2005 dollars is: $135,068.87.
I work for the Radio Astronomy Lab at UC Berkeley which is building the ATA with the SETI institute.
The ATA was once called the One Hectere Array (1HT) and wasn't originally
intended to be part of a SETI project. Once SETI sold the idea (along with the RAL) to the Allen Foundation, funding was approved. It's important to note that making arrays is not a manufacturing problem. It is mostly one of research. As technology progresses, the tools for doing science must be re-evaluated and if something cheaper/better or slightly more expensive/better comes along, it slows down the process of building.
The ATA has been in an R&D mode for many years and the new set of dishes being brought online is the columination of all the work done for it over the last 10-15 years. The VLA was a concept on a drawing board many years before it was built.
The cost for building has almost nothing to do with real estate prices. Most of the land was already under the control of UC of Cal, and the rest has been under lease from local land owners since the 1950's. Also, Hat Creek is a very radio quiet area. Radio quiet being a harder thing to come by year after year.