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Space Technology

Allen Telescope Array In Action 92

Posted by Zonk from the anybody-out-there dept.
DIY News writes "36 of an eventual herd of 350 dishes are now operational in a remote area 250 miles northeast of San Francisco. These antennas, 20 feet in diameter and the height of a football goal post, are the first installment of the Allen Telescope Array, and they are ideal for short SETI projects while the array is being built." From the articel: "The young ATA's first foray into SETI will be known by the straightforward (if not overly galvanic) name of Inner Galactic Plane Survey. The word 'survey' may surprise many who are familiar with this telescope's design. After all, it's being finely tuned to speedily examine large numbers of star systems in a so-called "targeted search". The completed array will be exceptionally nimble at such individual scrutiny, and will leave previous targeted searches in the data dust."
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Allen Telescope Array In Action More

Allen Telescope Array In Action

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  • Damn it (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 08, 2005 @01:53AM (#13745364)
    Got my hopes up, i thought i had read "Alien Telescope Array In Action." Drunk and bored, *sigh*

    • Re:Damn it (Score:2, Funny)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )
      Got my hopes up, i thought i had read "Alien Telescope Array In Action." Drunk and bored, *sigh*

      Perhaps we need a new set of moderation tags for drunk trolls, eh?

      I originally read it as "Allen Telescopes Alien in Action", as if this Allen dude is a space-born porn filmer.

      Long days are a substitute for LSD it seems.

      • Re:Damn it (Score:3, Funny)

        by Alien Being ( 18488 )
        "as if this Allen dude is a space-born porn filmer."

        Up Your Asteroid
        Mission to Uranus
        A Star is Porn
        Rock-It Ship
        Moondingo
        The Legend of Victor Thrust
        Rock-It Ship 2 - Re-entry
        Challenger: O-Ring Blowout (sorry)
        Roving Luna: How to Get Your Rocks Off
        Snow Blow and the Seven White Dwarves

  • I left my normalness back east (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @01:53AM (#13745365) Journal
    In the patchwork of dry, cow-fouled ranch lands 250 miles northeast of San Francisco, an unusual crop [antennae] is poking above the dusty shrubbery.

    Unusual crops and alien life (SETI responders) would not stand out near SF.
             

    • Re:I left my normalness back east (Score:4, Informative)

      by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @02:57AM (#13745514) Journal
      Unusual crops and alien life (SETI responders) would not stand out near SF. /sidenote: Damn, this CSS for /. SUCKS on IE! //sidenote

      San Fransicso is very liberal. But, this is on the OTHER side of California's Central Valley, which is VERY conservative, consisting of lots of rice/wheat/nut farmers who are as republican as any.

      (Sigh) If you think 250 miles from SF is "near" SF, you don't know your butt from a hole in the ground... or at least, you don't know California.
    • That area is nowhere near San Francisco; it's a 5 hour drive north. Happens to be my favorite vacation area right there at Lassen Volcanic National Park http://www.nps.gov/lavo/lassen_volcanic_national_p ark_home.htm [nps.gov], one of the more beautiful areas around (and not 'cow-fouled'). While there I had taken a side trip to the radio telescopes there in the past. They used to be bigger ones owned by one of the universitys. They were removed to make way for this project. Anyway, the area is a nice place to visit a
      • Uh oh, now you've not only told the aliens where the telescopes are, but gave them a little travel brochure about why else they might want to visit (the main reason, of course, being to take out the nosy radio telescopes). I'm thinking the "cow-fouled" part was deliberately put in the article to throw them off.
      • University of California runs the Hat Creek observatory. I've been there too, after camping in Lassen. Lassen is like Yosemite without the crowds. And it has showers. I can camp forever as long as there's a shower. Hat Creek observatory is worth a visit. Go on to Burney Falls afterward.

        Bruce

  • Has Anyone Considered... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spudwiser ( 124577 ) <`moc.liamtoh' `ta' `resiwdups'> on Saturday October 08, 2005 @02:04AM (#13745395) Journal
    That SETI, rather than looking in the wrong places... is looking in the wrong ways? ETs aren't going to let us see them until we know how to look at ourselves.
    • And robots will never replace human beings, because they cannot Love.

    • Re:Has Anyone Considered... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) * on Saturday October 08, 2005 @03:17AM (#13745543)
      SETI's search parameters are based on some really well though out assumptions about how ET civilizations might try communicating. In a technological society where eletromagnetic radition is reasonably well understood it shouldn't take too long to figure out that the radio portion of the EM spectrum is really useful, especially if their physiology remotely resembles anything on Earth. We can't naturally detect radio waves so we don't hear a buzzing sound when talking on cell phones and we can't see it so we're not blinded by an FM reparter on a hilltop. Radio travels quite far in all sorts of media and can be generated and detected with relatively simple electronics. Lower frequencies are also much easier to broadcast omnidirectionally so multiple receivers can pick up a signal simulteneously. Suffice to say that radio is something a technological civilization is probably going to make good use of. Because of radio's propogation characteristics it is possible to detect signals at extreme distances.

      Because of this our solar system is surrounded by a bubble of radio chatter about a hundred light years in diameter, expanding a bit farther every year. A technological civilization within this bubble of radio noise is quite likely to see us. A thousand years from now a technological civilization within a two thousand light year bubble could potentially see us. Therefore it is assumed that we could see another civilization's radio noise. This is SETI's general search criteria, evidense of a technological civilization outside of our solar system.

      Now if a technological civilization were deliberately trying to send us a message. Maybe not us specifically but anyone out in the galaxy who might be able to find such a signal. How might that civilization send out a signal? There's lots of different ways but there's a really good chance they would send it via radio. As mentioned, it has excellent propogation characteristics. Radio signals reach us from the edges of the visible universe, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to get a signal a few hundred or thousand lightyears. It is also something the universe is teeming with. There's radio sources all over the place yet also quite a few empty bands. A civilization that figures out how radio works and happens to point an antenna at the sky will find this out quickly.

      Now it is possible advanced civilizations might communicate via some extremely high tech means. SETI's notion is twofold, we will be able to see random noise generated by a civilization or we'll get a deliberate signal from one. Under premise one we might see radio traffic of some super technological civilization, they might be broadcasting gravity wave signals but we might be able to see their radar. Under the second premise a civilization wanting to be seen by others would attempt to communicate in the most fundamental way possible. Radio waves are pretty fundamental. It takes a modest command of physics and electronics to detect them and understand what you're actually seeing.

      So yes it has been considered.

      • Re:Has Anyone Considered... (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        SETI's search parameters are based on some really well though out assumptions about how ET civilizations might try communicating.

        What saddens me is that we have a lot of intelligent life here on earth in the form of other species such as whales, elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, and rhinos. The animals have no way of communicating to other civilizations, but that doesn't make them any less special or less intelligent. Imagine if we ventured to another world and found similar types of animals? That woul

      • I think what spudwiser may have been getting at is that while yes, the physics of interstellar radio transmission have been taken into account in the search for ETI, the fact that we simply can't know what we don't understand yet has not been taken into account. And it by definition CAN'T be taken into account yet because we are still to primitive to know of it!

        Put it this way, there are still tribes of native people in South America which are mostly closed off from the outside world and which communicate t
        • But! If these tribesmen see smoke from our coal burning power plants, they would very likely figure out that there are people making the smoke. The parent isn't saying that advanced alien civilizatons wouldn't use tech we don't understand. He is just saying that we would likely see something that we could recognize as artificial, and thus intellegent in origin. The trick isn't in understanding alien transmissions right away. The first step is finding out if they even exist. If you can do that, THEN yo
      • SETI's search parameters are based on some really well though out assumptions about how ET civilizations might try communicating.

        You wish. There are two groups that dominate the public arguments for passive SETI [daviddarling.info]: those who directly anthropomorphize alien civilizations [berkeley.edu] and those that use a thought-out logic that is still steeped in assumptions of human-like intelligence [rochester.edu]. While this may be reasonable both are really large asumptions that limit our search. The anthro's are screwed becuase any signals using c

        • In the end, we may be getting detectably strong ET signals right now. But, we cannot hear them for the chatter of our own civilization which prefers to use the same channel for repeating Brittney Spears' 3 top selling songs.

          This is part of the reason the ATA was built. It's design includes active interference mitigation which allows it to observe frequencies terrestrial emitters are using. It can also scan a huge field of view and a vast range of frequencies from 500MHz to 11.2GHz. The SETI portion of the

    • That SETI, rather than looking in the wrong places... is looking in the wrong ways? ETs aren't going to let us see them until we know how to look at ourselves.

      We know anyone looking at this planet would see us shining like a beacon in the radio spectrum. Or are you trying to make some mystical point?

    • I thought that the ability to look at ourselves was an inherent part of sapient intelligence, it is just ignored by the majority because there is no profit in it and the segment of society that is driven by nothing but profit insist that we look at them.

      As long as Paul doesn't point the array at his ex's in redmond there is always hope of finding intelligence ;-).

  • Goalposts, now? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Myself ( 57572 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @02:11AM (#13745410) Journal
    <gripe>It just wouldn't do to say how many feet tall the telescopes are, since nobody knows how big a foot is. No, we have to specify height in relation to a goalpost, since obviously everyone reading Slashdot is intimately familiar with football goalposts (is that american football, or soccer?) and how to convert them into other common measurements.</gripe>

  • Cool, but (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rackrent ( 160690 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @02:22AM (#13745443)
    While I'm all for SETI, it seems we have so many other things to learn first. Personally, I'm a big fan of the work done at the coolest of all "Arrays", the Very Large Array [nrao.edu] located in New Mexico. It's a sight to behold, and the information they gather through radio information has been extremely valuable over the years.

    I'm sure it's that more impressive as it is in the middle of nowhere...there is a visitor center there (unstaffed) and the last time I went through there they sold postcards, pictures, etc., and had a box where you were kindly asked to deposit your payment. That tells me they were interested in the science first, the glitz and glamour of space.com is probably very low on their list.

  • From the articel (Score:3)

    by 1u3hr ( 530656 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @02:23AM (#13745447)
    For God's sake Zonk, use spellcheck.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • If you see a mistake in a story, email the author. We'll get it fixed pronto.

        For the record, I did that before I made the above post, about 11 hours ago now. Zonk particularly seems to be untroubled by spelling, grammar, dupes... and never makes any corrections. Taco screws up frequently, but occasionally does fix a glaring error.

  • Why does a lower-case L look so much like an lower case I in my font? I was getting REALLY excited for a second...
  • Did anyone else get a huge grey box with a little Flash window in it that covered up the whole article and wouldn't go away?


    Until recently I've tried to be a bit discriminating with Adblock, only blocking ads that move about or flash in an annoying way. Lately though, I've started blocking http://./ [.]/* from any company that does adverts, because they are all just so obtrusive.


  • 350 anntennas array?
    Imagine a beowulf cluster of this!

  • Are they ever going to finish it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by heroine ( 1220 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @04:56AM (#13745718) Homepage
    This Allen Telescope Array has been getting advertised for at least 15 years now and all they've gotten is 10% of it erected and not a single bit of data yet. They must be spending $1 a year on it.

    Wouldn't it be farther along if they didn't build it on the most expensive real estate in the world? Maybe instead of spending 15 years building 10% of it outside Sacramento they could compromise and build it 1 mile east of Calif* for a trillion dollars less.

    Are they ever going to finish it or is it just supposed to be neverending publicity for Paul Allen?

    • This Allen Telescope Array has been getting advertised for at least 15 years now and all they've gotten is 10% of it erected and not a single bit of data yet. They must be spending $1 a year on it.

      Wouldn't it be farther along if they didn't build it on the most expensive real estate in the world? Maybe instead of spending 15 years building 10% of it outside Sacramento they could compromise and build it 1 mile east of Calif* for a trillion dollars less.

      Mr Google tells me it's nearest Cassel CA, populati

      • Mr Google tells me it's nearest Cassel CA, population 366, in the Mt. Lassen Area. That is a low priced area. The median home in Cassel in the 2000 Census data was valued at $130,000.

        $130.000 is not low priced. My parents paid about $37,000 for their first house in the 70's and it had four bedrooms. Granted it was in a slightly slummish area of the suburban Midwest/Chicagoland but still a good deal.

        In my opinion a house shouldn't cost that much without some seriously nice features and some good land.

        Be
        • $130.000 is not low priced. My parents paid about $37,000 for their first house in the 70's and it had four bedrooms. Granted it was in a slightly slummish area of the suburban Midwest/Chicagoland but still a good deal.

          In my opinion a house shouldn't cost that much without some seriously nice features and some good land.

          Besides - other than physical maintenance why do the people need to live near it once it's built? I can understand temporary housing while building it but if you put it on cheap land you

        • 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 s
    • They already own it. And they don't pay taxes. But in any case, Real Estate is not by any means the largest expense.

      There is lots of space in Mojave, but who wants to live there? The personnel would much rather live at Hat Creek. I expect that getting good personnel is a more difficult problem than finding empty land in California.

      Bruce

    • 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/
  • While the dishes may be useful for radio astronomy, the concept of radio SETI is so absurd at this point in evolution that its support is entirely unjustified.

    The entire concept is over 40 years old and is based on a lack of understanding as to how complex species evolve. If we are to understand SETI there has to be an update of the concepts which integrate them with both modern molecular biology as well as modern computer science. The "traditional" radio astronomy researchers have generally failed to do
  • Surely, any alien civilisation would be sending out 1 out of each pair of entangled photons. They would keep one and keeping changing its spin. This would allow for instantaneous communication. Obviously we would need to technology to capture one or more of these photons. How far off is this technology and is it possible theoretically? (i.e. doesn't break any laws)
    • I think the deal is that even though the entangled photons change instantaneously, the means to receive the information that they changed cannot travel faster than "c." I think the cryptographic significance relies on subtracting that information, so I've wondered if maybe it would be possible to subtract the entangled photon information from some universal constant and thus somehow make instantaneous communication possible. Maybe someone out there who really understands this could enlighten the rest of u
    • The minute you say "instantaneous communication", we can throw out the idea as being impossible under our current knowledge of physics. It's a problem of "causality".

      Basically, here's how it works. You've got two events, separated in time and space. Say, I sneeze, and somebody at Alpha Centauri falls out of his chair three years later (three years in both people's rest frames. let's assume they're not moving relative to each other). Relativity says the relative time between those events can be shifted by up
      • But what happens if the guy on Alpha Centuri--or within the realm of our near-term technology, a space craft at Saturn--has a "box" with the other one of two entangled photons. If he manipulates his, how long before we know it by the effect on ours? Isn't that something to do with the subtraction of info from something we both previously know?
      • AS far as I know, there is no "explanation" for entanglement and the inherent instantaneous communication. I'm sure Einstein said it was "spooky action at a distance" or something along those lines. So i guess the ball is still in the court...somewhere :]
  • These tiny arrays of dishes aren't going to show us much. We need arrays spread out across the entire solar system if we really want to see some interesting stuff. Like SWINE and OLGA [nature.com]
  • SETI: "Silly Effort To Investigate" coined by Stan Friedman. Total waste of time to be looking for radio signals from "aliens". Who says they have or will ever use radio signals?? Besides, they're already here, all you have to do is get your head out of your ass and go read some good books on the subject... If you laugh, you're ignorant. SETI indeed...

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