After hibernating its Allen Telescope Array back in April 2011 due to lack of funding, the SETI institute has announced it has now secured the funding to restart the ATA and resume search for extraterrestrial life.
The telescope array consists of 42 20-feet-wide telescopes located some 300 miles north of San Francisco. Originally funded largely by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who donated $25 million to the project, the ATA had to go into hibernation after state budget cuts affected the project’s funding.
The new funding has been obtained partly by donations from the public, and partly by the United States Air Force as part of a formal assessment of the instrument’s utility for Space Situational Awareness.
The news is especially exciting in the light of recent discovery of many new exoplanet candidates by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
“For the first time, we can point our telescopes at stars, and know that those stars actually host planetary systems – including at least one that begins to approximate an Earth analog in the habitable zone around its host star. That’s the type of world that might be home to a civilization capable of building radio transmitters,” said Jill Tarter, the Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute.
[via SETI]
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