Todays News: Budget Cuts Shutter SETI's Search for Aliens

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Budget Cuts Shutter SETI's Search for Aliens

By Wired UK
April 27, 2011 |
1:45 pm |
Categories: Space

By Alice Vincent, Wired UK

A collection of radio telescopes dedicated solely to listening out for extraterrestrial life has been put into “hibernation” because of a lack of funds.

The Allen Telescope Array in Northern California has a combined collecting area of one hectare, and was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. However, just three and a half years after the array began its hunt for extraterrestrial life, the money has dried up.

ATA is a joint project between the SETI Institute — a not-for-profit organization dedicated to establishing the possibility of life beyond Earth, or astrobiology — and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Like SETI, ATA is funded by a mixture of private foundations and organizations such as NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The ATA is located in the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, so it also gets cash from the National Science Foundation and the state of California, but both of these monetary sources have shrunk considerably over recent months. Annual costs for ATA operations are $1.5 million and the SETI campaign at the array are another $1 million.

According to Scientific American, on April 22 ATA’s donors received a letter from SETI’s CEO, Tom Pierson, stating: “Starting this week, the equipment is unavailable for normal observations and is being maintained in a safe state by a significantly reduced staff.”

The ATA was conceived in a series of SETI Institute workshops in 1997, which established that an LSND array (“Large Number of Small Dishes”, all working together) was more effective than one big antenna for collecting data. The ATA was proposed as a result.

The project was planned to be built in four phases, during which the number of telescopes would increase over time, eventually reaching 350. After securing $25 million of funding from Allen in 2001, the first phase was completed in 2007, when 42 dishes began operation at the cost of $50 million.

Although the ATA isn’t the only radio telescope facility which is capable of searching for alien life, it’s the only one dedicated almost wholly to the task. The SETI Institute had plans to use the ATA to listen out for radio emissions from the extrasolar planets discovered by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft.

The project is attempting to source new funds, along with new uses for the array. SETI has offered up the ATA’s abilities to help the U.S. Air Force track orbiting debris that could be harmful to defense satellites. Pierson says that he’s hopeful that these other uses “will help provide future operating funds”.

Image: Part of SETI’s Allen Telescope Array. (brewbooks/Flickr)

Source: Wired.co.uk

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