New Telescope
Paul Allan has given another $13.5 Million to a group jointly run by SETI and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. This brings his donations to $25 Mil.
As reported by
KOMO-TV, this will be used to fun the construction of the Allen Telescope Array. The new telescope, actually a network of 350 small radio-frequency dishes linked by computer, is being built on about 2½ acres of lava beds north of Lassen Peak near the high-desert hamlet of Hat Creek, about 215 miles north-northeast of San Francisco.
Very cool stuff. By using a large number of small dishes, you can get the effect of a huge diameter single dish (very good spacial resolution) at a fraction of the expense. What you loose is the amount of signal that you can capture. Considering that electronics now can detect single electrons with ease, this is not an issue.
Another cool feature of this design is that these 350 dishes can be split up into many smaller arrays to do coarse searches of different areas of the sky. If they find an interesting target, more of them can be brought online to get a more detailed image.
Posted by DaveH at March 19, 2004 9:24 AM