FYI...Grakkl (FAA)
Search for Alien Life Gets Boost, William Schiffmann, AP Writer
LAFAYETTE, Calif. (AP) -- With a whir of electric motors, seven
satellite dishes swung as one Wednesday, pointing blindly into
space in the first demonstration of technology scientists hope will
let them eavesdrop on intelligent civilizations thousands of
light-years in space.
The dishes are the prototype of what is being called the One
Hectare Telescope, a joint project of the SETI Institute -- for
Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence -- and the University of
California, Berkeley.
By 2005, the project could include as many as 1,000 of the
6-meter dishes on 2 1/2 acres near Mount Lassen in the rugged hills of
Northern California. The dishes, synchronized to shift together,
will collect signals from space.
The price tag is a relative pittance as scientific endeavors go.
At a news conference in the wooded hills above this wealthy enclave
25 miles east of San Francisco, the institute's executive director,
Thomas Pierson, set the bill at about $25 million.
``We've always wondered as a human species -- are we alone?'' he
said.
So how do the dishes do their job? While optical telescopes use
mirrors or lenses to collect light to create a visible image, a
radio telescope focuses faint radio waves onto a receiver, much
like the one in your stereo system, which amplifies them so they
are detectable.
``We want to build for the first time, an instrument that takes
hundreds of commercial satellite dishes and build one of the
largest radio telescopes in the world,'' said Dr. Leo Blitz,
director of the UC Berkeley Radio Astronomy Laboratory.
''(If we succeed) we will have made one of the major discoveries
of the common era, or we will find out how alone we really are. In
either case, we will have succeeded in learning something important
about our place in the universe,'' he said.
Plans first call for a look at 1,000 relatively close stars
similar to our sun, then the project will move on to peer first at
100,000 and then a million sun-like stars in the Milky Way.
The project began 40 years ago, and for many years was funded
through NASA. But in 1993, Congress cut the cash flow and SETI has
been financed privately ever since.
The seven dishes, which were shown to the public for the first
time Wednesday, won't be searching the heavens in earnest. Instead,
they will be used to solve a variety of scientific and technical
challenges linked to what scientists called the ``back end'' of the
telescope. That includes developing methods for dealing with
interference, especially from orbiting satellites.
Also under study will be the drive systems that aim the dishes,
the software that directs the drives and early versions of a device
called the digital beamformer, which will allow the telescope to
observe multiple stars and other radio astronomical sources at the
same time.
Once completed, the telescope will be the largest array in the
world dedicated solely to searching for signs of intelligent life
elsewhere in the universe. It will be comparable to the Very Large
Array in New Mexico, the world's premier instrument for radio
astronomy.
By adding additional dishes, the telescope can be easily and
economically expanded.
Dr. Jill C. Tartar, director of SETI research and the
inspiration for the Jodie Foster character in the movie
``Contact,'' was delighted as the dishes were demonstrated.
``We just can't wait to get started,'' she said.