SETI Alien-Hunting Telescope Array Shut Down After Funding Slows

                                              SETI Alien-Hunting Telescope



The SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array has been forced offline due to lack of funding, essentially crippling the organization's hunt for extraterrestrial communications.

In a note to supporters by SETI Institute chief executive Tom Pierson earlier this week, Pierson noted that reduced funding by both the National Science Foundation and U.C. Berkeley had put the telescope array, which searches the sky for radio transmissions, into "hibernation".

"Hibernation means that, starting this week, the equipment is unavailable for normal observations and is being maintained in a safe state by a significantly reduced staff," Pierson wrote.

Until SETI can raise additional funding, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) will remain offline. It takes about $1.5 million per year top operate the ATA, Pierson wrote, and an additional $1 million per year to cover the additional costs of the SETI science effort. SETI referred possible donors to its donations page.

The SETI Institute is just one of a number of different efforts involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, for SETI. The ATA was designed as a collection of radio telescopes - the eventual goal being 350 antennas. Working in concert, the antennas scanned the sky, "listening" for patterns in the radio waves sent across the universe by black holes, stars, and - hopefully - alien life. The goal was to explore 100,000 or even 1 million nearby stars, according to the SETI Institute.

A separate effort, known as SETI@home, takes data collected via radio signals from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, breaks it up into chunks, and sends them over to users who have downloaded the client software and attempts to look for patterns via distributed computing.

"We also plan to develop new tools that will enable citizen scientists to help us identify the sources of radio frequency interference, and new avenues for application developers to add new visualizations and detection algorithms," Pierson added.

The SETI Institute recently launched a similar application, called SetiQuest Explorer, designed to allow citizen scientist volunteers to look for patterns in data from the ATA that might be missed by current algorithms, and help the Institute explore frequency bands that are so full of signals that its detectors get confused, the Institute said.

The problem that the SETI Institute ran into was funding, Pierson wrote. The ATA is a partnership between the SETI Institute and the Radio Astronomy Lab of the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). The SETI Institute raised funds for the Array, while the UCB's budget has funded the operations of the Array for the last five decades. The ATA is part of the Hat Creek Observatory, which has itself been funded by both National Science Foundation grants as well as budgetary support via the UCB lab.

The issue, Pierson wrote, is that the NSF funding for the Hat Creek site has been cut to a tenth of its former level. And, due to the ongoing California budget crisis, the levels of funding available have been "severely reduced," Pierson said.

Part of the Institute's early work was in conjunction with the U.S. Air Force, which provided funding so that the SETI Institute could monitor local space debris. The SETI Institute had hoped that it might next explore 1,235 so-called "Kepler worlds" where exoplanets had been identified, increasing the chances that alien communications might be discovered.