Today, in the remote northeast corner of California, technology innovator and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen will hit the big red button.
No, he won’t be throwing heavy-duty machinery into an emergency shutdown, nor will he be sending ICBMs screaming from their silos (traditional functions for ruddy buttons). Instead, he’ll be christening a new telescope that, in its significance, could eventually outpace the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.
The famous technologist will be inaugurating the initial 42 antennas of his namesake, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) – the first major radio telescope designed from the pedestal up to efficiently (which is to say, rapidly) chew its way through long lists of stars in a search for alien signals. Within two decades, it will increase the number of stellar systems examined for artificial emissions by a thousand-fold. The ATA will shift SETI into third gear.
In past practice, this elementary fact of antenna life was routinely diluted by the high cost of the receiver equipment. Check out the cryo-cooled, quiet-as-death receivers at the focus of any other radio telescope, and you’re looking at a million dollars’ worth of electronics. That’s why the Very Large Array – the iconic radio telescope in New Mexico that you’ve seen in a raft of sci-fi films – has only 27 antennas. That number was a compromise between structural and electronic costs.
Today, you can festoon the focus of your antenna with high-grade receivers for about one percent of the old price. So the paradigm has changed, and today it’s better to build a large number of small antennas, rather than a small number of large antennas.
The individual dishes of the ATA are 6 m in diameter, small enough that you can’t see them from California state route 89, even though they’re barely a mile beyond its eastern berm. Like slow-growing lotus blossoms, these antennas have methodically erupted on a lava-littered heath 300 miles northeast of San Francisco during the last four years. Eventually, 350 dishes will grace the Hat Creek Observatory site. But the 42 now up and running are equivalent in collecting area to a 40 m single-dish antenna – and that’s large enough to start doing some serious science.
SPACE.com — Inauguration Day for Alien Signal-Hunting Telescope