SETI Brings Critical Telescope Back Online

The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), named after Microsoft co-founder and sponsor Paul Allen, has now been brought back online, after funding issues have forced officials at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute to shut it down temporarily earlier this year.

Interestingly enough, in the time the telescope has been offline, the number of targets it needs to cover has increased by more than 1,000. This occurred on Monday, December 5, when the Kepler Telescope science mission team presented a new batch of exoplanetary candidates.

SETI and the University of California in Berkeley's (UCB) Radio Astronomy Laboratory (RAL) are intent on using ATA to study these worlds. If any of them has intelligent life, then the 42 antennas currently making up the telescope will surely find any radio signals they may emit.

The announcement that ATA was brought back online was made at the Kepler Science Conference on Monday, just when the Kepler findings were announced. The meeting was held at the NASA Ames Research Center (ARC), in Moffett Fields, California.

“This morning, at 6:18, we began re-observing the Kepler worlds. We're just extremely excited to be back on the air today,” SETI Institute Center for SETI Research director Jill Tarter said at the meeting.

The entire rationale behind ATA is that any technologically-advanced civilization would have to communicate over great distances, and would therefore have to use electronic telecommunications. This is why experts are looking for such signs in radio wavelengths.

Until now, the research has been focused more on conducting random scans of the sky. After Kepler launched, in 2009, the ATA started being used to look at the most promising exoplanetary candidates the NASA telescope identified, Space reports.

Thus far, Kepler has proposed the existence of 54 extrasolar planets in the habitable zones around their respective parent stars. One of them was even confirmed by independent measurements. These are naturally prime targets for the Allen Telescope Array as well.

“What we think we know actually might be a barrier to [finding] what is actually out there. We intend to systematically explore all of these candidates,” Tarter explained. She added that the telescope was restarted with a $230,000 donation made by the general public and the US Air Force (USAF).

“We now know where to look for planets. We're going to take the public's quest for technosignatures to the next level,” Tarter concludes.