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Project Phoenix

February 11, 2004

by Mike Davis, Director of SETI Projects

Arecibo is a lively place these days. The 6 to 8 GHz receiver, one of those originally planned to accompany the Gregorian upgrade, was hoisted into place in the Gregorian dome and bolted down yesterday. Today it is being cooled down to 16 Kelvin (-257 C or -431 F), prior to testing on the sky. In addition, there was a meeting this morning, one of many, to discuss the 7-feed Arecibo L-band Feed Array, ALFA, soon to join the complement of a dozen feeds already in place.

It's interesting to see these ideas, planned many years ago while I was still on the staff here, finally coming to fruition. It seems hard to believe I left nearly four years ago to join the SETI Institute, and the teams working on design of the Allen Telescope Array and SETI detectors. It is certainly a pleasure to benefit from the successful completion of both the Gregorian upgrading and the new SETI detectors, and to be looking forward to first use of the ATA later this year. Sixty-five is turning out to be a very fine age indeed.

The telescope has been working very well for us. We were able to start normal observations the first night, after a short run to sample the interference over the frequency range we plan to use, 1.75 to 3.0 GHz, and store it in the database.

The database continues to learn about Earths signals as we observe, so that a quick check can tell whether a particular signal has been seen before when the telescope was pointing in a different direction. This allows us to eliminate that signal from consideration.  So far, we have about 27,000 interfering signals stored in the database after two night's observing. These eliminate access to about 2% of the spectrum. In addition, we have marked about 25 two-MHz blocks as too contaminated to deal with, about half associated with the new digital audio broadcast satellites near 2.3 GHz. In addition, Observatory filters eliminate two heavily populated bands associated with microwave ovens and other popular 'transmitters'. We still have access to over 800 MHz, which we cover many times per night, observing a different star on each pass.

All is not pure industry and hard work. Jean and I will welcome two grandchildren on Sunday. They are visiting from Boston for a week. Look for Theron and Kyra on SETICAM some evening next week, as the younger generation begins to learn the ropes.