ACKS Seminar by Jill Tarter (SETI)

Scientific results are now being produced by the first 42 antennas of
the Allen Telescope Array (ATA).  The array is being built at the Hat
Creek Radio Observatory in northern California by the SETI Institute
and the University of California Berkeley Radio Astronomy Laboratory.
This revolutionary array will eventually consist of 350 dishes, each
6m in diameter, and will be an ideal instrument for surveying the
radio sky for astrophysical sources and signals from distant
technologies.  It will have the collecting area of a single telescope
114m in diameter, the spatial resolution of a 900m diameter antenna,
and unprecedented instantaneous frequency coverage from 500 MHz to 11
GHz.  The array makes use of COTS technologies to minimize cost, and
its design enables SETI and traditional radio astronomy to be
conducted simultaneously.  The ATA is all about speed; it is the first
snapshot radio camera.  We expect that it will do for the radio sky
what the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has done for the optical sky.  In
addition, there is the exciting prospect that it may provide an answer
to the old question, "Are we alone?"