2878: Solar Eclipse at the Hat Creek Observatory

Statement

A few weeks ago, I went to the Hat Creek Radio Observatory for the Solar Eclipse event. When you add it up, Scientific Research is the largest category of Federal employment in the 18th Congressional District. The Hat Creek Radio Telescope is owned by the SETI Institute of Mountain View.

The Observatory is located near Lassen Volcano park, and, by an incredible coincidence, is located directly on the path of the May 20, 2012 eclipse. During the event, the radio telescope was set to take a series of pictures at the wavelength of 10 cm. The image quality should be similar to television, and the results should be ready soon.

The current instrument is named the Allen telescope, and is an innovative design in many ways. It is the first radio telescope which is explicitly designed to be upgraded to use better technology, and to take advantage of Moore's Law in a pre-planned way. It is also the first array telescope to be built on a scatter pattern, rather then a linear array. It is one of the first radio telescopes to use an off-axis focus, which reduces the sensitivity to interference, and it is the first large radio telescope whose design is optimized to detect artificial radio sources.

The SETI Institute had a star party on Saturday night, and a barbecue on Sunday afternoon, followed by the actual eclipse. My role was to check names at the front gate. That's right, my job at the radio telescope was to be the bouncer. I think that they are trying to tell me something.

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I took various mini-tours as part of the event. My major conclusion is that the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence* is one of those high-payoff/low-probability-of-success research projects which requires funding from the government or from non-profit sources.

From talking with people at the event, I believe that the following activities would provide the best return for the money:

1. Populating the existing outlier pads** would increase the effective size of the array from 300 meters to over 600 meters, which would reduce the pixel size by a linear factor of 2. This is a factor of 4 improvement in the raw image quality.

2. The electronics are getting rather old. Replacing the down-converters and digitizers with new stuff would probably increase the usable bandwidth by a factor of at least 2. Replacing the current beam-formers and interferometers with a linux farm would be a lot cheaper and a lot better. It is kind of hard to say how much better. My take on it is that the number of beams could go from 3 to 30 with only a minor additional air conditioning load. The major technology issue is whether x86 type computers or multi-core ARM computers should be used.

3. Proposals to replace the low-noise amplifier with upgraded designs would cost a lot of money and would improve the signal-to-noise ratio by a factor of 2. The proposed upgrades would also increase the raw bandwidth of the system, but it is questionable whether improving the array's native sensitivity to, say, 12GHZ would be cost-effective. There is a lot of water vapor in the area, and clouds are common, even in the summer.

The history of SETI funding is kind of depressing. For an activity which is most likely going to succeed after decades or centuries of work, there have been an awful lot of one-year budgets. For example, the recent California financial crisis resulted in the observatory being shut down for several months when the University of California had its budget cut.

My recommendation for funding Hat Creek is that the operating budget be set up for at least the next 10 years, and that the outlier pads be populated with new dishes. I also recommend that a detailed schedule be prepared for replacing the electronics.

As for the upgraded low-noise-amplifier project, it should be continued at a low level of funding, and everybody should pray that the economy gets better.

-Dave Chapman
Candidate for Congress
18th District of California
Palo Alto

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