Past Tours
Meet the Staff of HCRO
HCRO History (and directions)
ATA Construction Pics
History Poster .eps
HCRO: The Movie!
small screen(9 MB)
big screen(57 MB)
Some Cool Links:
Hi! My name is Sanj. I'm the summer intern at Hat Creek Radio Observatory and this is my website. Here you can become aquainted with the HCRO's history, learn the faces of the staff, and find some pictures that document the Allen Telescope Array's (that's ATA for short) growth during the summer of '05. If you see anything wrong with the information I've provided on this website, please email me at bigbrar@berkeley.edu.
That's me with the Redding Astronomy Club driving one of the millimeter-wave antennas (an element of the BIMA array) that have sinced moved away to a higher elevation in the Inyo Mountains (~6,000ft). Those Antennas have joined other millimeter antenna's previously operated by CalTech to form a new array called CARMA.
Right now a new array is being built at Hat Creek Radio Observatory. It's called the ATA. So what is the ATA exactly? Well, the ATA is a radio astronomy instrument that will be operated and funded through a patnership between the University of California, Berkeley and the SETI Institute. In case you haven't heard, SETI is an acronym that stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Here's a quick summary of SETI's radio search...
So our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across and is comprised of somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars.
About 1,000,000 of those stars will be closely scanned by the ATA in search of a narrow band radio signal (an artifiact of an artificial transmitter).
In addition to its close search of one million stars, SETI will scan 40 billion stars from the inner galactic plain for very strong transmitters.
Most people are familiar with the SETI@home project. If you have SETI@home, your computer is searching through a chunk of data taken from a SETI run at the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico. The SETI search in Arecibo was called Project Phoenix. Project Pheonix searched within a roughly a 200 light years radius of stars (61.53 pc). The ATA will search through a 975 light year radius of stars (300 pc).
The ATA will be almost 1,000 times faster than the Arecibo telescope, between 20 and 2000 times faster than the Very Large Array (depending on the scientific program) and 50 times faster than the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). The ATA will be the fastest Radio telescope in the world making it perfect for doing surveys. Some of the projects that the ATA will be doing in the coming year include surveying transient radio sources, galactic hydrogen, and pulsars.
One of the coolest things about the ATA is its feed. A feed is just an antenna or reciever. The ATA's feed will be able to recieve emmsission between 500 MHz and 11.2 GHz simultaneously!
The reciever is cooled down to increase it's sensitivity to temperatures within 50 degrees above absolute zero. This is done via a cryogenic cooler. The mechanism that makes these temperatures possible is similar to the one inside your refrigerator, but instead of using freon, we use helium as our refrigerant.
The Summer of '05 will mainly be spent on assembling the dishes and trying to make them work together. Here's a cool video showing a dish being mounted on its pedastool. We call that exotic looking orange and white tractor the "T Rex".
Dish Installation Movie (6 Mb)