Hat Creek Radio Observatory

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The Hat Creek Radio Observatory is a radio observatory in California , about 500 km northeast of San Francisco at an altitude of 1,280 m. It was founded by the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and operated until 2012, when operations were transferred to SRI International .

85 foot radio telescope

Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO) was founded in the 1950s by the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1960, a radio telescope with an 85-foot (26 m) antenna diameter went into operation and was used until it collapsed in a storm in 1993.

BIMA millimeter interferometer

In the 1970s, experiments with a radio interferometer for the millimeter wave range began with two telescopes. More telescopes were added successively until, in the 1990s, ten telescopes, each with an antenna diameter of 6 m, had receivers for 3 mm and (except for one telescope) 1 mm wavelength. This interferometer was developed jointly with the University of Illinois ( Urbana - Champaign and the) University of Maryland ( College Park powered) and is the name of this working group ( B erkeley I llinois M aryland A ssociation) as BIMA interferometer known.

in 2005 nine of the telescopes of the BIMA interferometer were relocated to become part of the CARMA interferometer.

Allen Telescope Array (ATA)

Rendering of the Allen Telescope Array

In 2005, the construction of a new radio interferometer for the centimeter wave range (frequencies from 0.5 to 11.2 GHz ) began in Hat Creek . In the originally planned final expansion, it should include 350 telescopes, each with an antenna diameter of 6.1 m, which are scattered over an area of ​​1 km in diameter. Because of the associated collection area, it was formerly known as the “1 hectare telescope”. It owes its new name to financial support from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen .

With many relatively simple telescopes, a large simultaneously covered frequency range, a large simultaneously covered field of view due to the many individual telescopes as well as highly developed computer processing of the received signals, the Allen Telescope Array like LOFAR is an example of a new generation of large radio interferometers, which are to lead to the planned international square kilometer array .

The Allen Telescope Array should be used both for radio astronomical observations and for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

Since the financing of the full ATA could not be secured, only 42 antennas were built until 2007. When donors (the State of California, the University of Berkeley, and the National Science Foundation ) suspended their grants on short notice in April 2011, the project seemed certain to end. The University of California, Berkeley withdrew in 2012 from the project, which has since been operated by SRI International and is to be used for the SETI Institute .

Much of the telescope time is rented to the US Air Force , which observes satellites and space debris as part of the Space Surveillance Network (SSN).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ UC Berkeley Passes Management Of Allen Telescope Array To SRI. In: spacedaily.com. April 19, 2012, accessed April 5, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Douglas C.-J. Bock: The Allen Telescope Array. (PDF; 406 kB) Archived from the original on October 27, 2014 ; accessed on April 5, 2020 .
  3. ^ The Allen Telescope Array - A New Tool for SETI and Other Radio Astronomy , bibcode : 2001aprs.conf..250B
  4. ↑ Harald Zaun: "This new SETI program overshadows everything that has gone before"! In: heise.de. Telepolis , July 21, 2015, accessed July 21, 2015 .

Coordinates: 40 ° 49 ′ 4 "  N , 121 ° 28 ′ 24"  W.