Search for Alien Signals Stalls for Want of Cash

NATURE|Vol 444|2 November 2006 NEWS

The Allen Telescope Array will consist of 350 satellite dishes — if funds can be found. S. SHOSTAK/SETI INST. S. SHOSTAK/SETI

Search for alien signals stalls for want of cash

An ambitious radio array project that will for the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, join the search for extraterrestrial intelligence based in Seattle, Washington. (SETI) is running into money problems. Astronomers often use private funding for Construction of the Allen Telescope Array, telescopes, and almost as often find themselves named after its chief benefactor, Microsoft in tight spots. Researchers at the California co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen, will halt Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena at the end of this year unless further funding nearly abandoned the second of the huge Keck is found. Allen is currently withholding millions telescopes before NASA provided a multi-mil- because the project has failed to recruit other lion-dollar bailout. donors. And the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a $70- “Down here in the trenches it’s really terribly million map of the sky, had to beg and bor- worrisome,” says Jill Tarter, director row from collaborators, says of the privately funded SETI Insti- “Down here in the James Gunn, a founder of the tute in Mountain View, California, trenches it’s really project at Princeton University which is developing the project. terribly worrisome.” in New Jersey. “We were on The array, which is being built the edge of financial disaster at Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Califor- more or less continuously,” he says, adding that nia, was conceived in the late 1990s as a cheap the project has since repaid most of its debts. way to search for extraterrestrial radio trans- With the funds currently available, the Allen missions. For about $25 million, researchers Telescope Array will have just 42 of its planned believed they could build a radio telescope 350 dishes up by the end of the year, according with 350 commercially available satellite to Leo Blitz, an astronomer at the University dishes. The price went up to $43 million in of California, Berkeley, the project’s major 2003, when scientists decided to upgrade the collaborator. This will still be enough to start dishes and other components, allowing the doing science, he adds. array to do radio astronomy as well as search- But the full array would be much better, says ing for alien signals. Shri Kulkarni, a radio astronomer at Caltech. In 2000, Allen gave the project’s research The more expensive array would deliver budget $11.5 million. He pledged $13.5 mil- high-resolution, wide-angle images of the sky lion more for construction in 2003 — but the relatively cheaply, he says. money was contingent on the SETI Institute And it would be an important proof-of- raising another $16 million in private funding principle for future radio observatories, such (see Nature 428, 358; 2004). as the international Square Kilometre Array. If To date, the institute has raised less than the Allen array didn’t move forward, Kulkarni $9 million. Allen is withholding $3.85 million says, “it would be a pity in almost every way until the institute can “meet its contractual I could think of”. ■ obligations”, says Jason Hunke, a spokesman Geoff Brumfiel