SETI Institute announced that it had raised $200,000 from a crowd-sourced fundraising effort that launched this spring. The money, which came from just over 2,000 people who want to keep the search for alien life alive, will help the institute put its Allen Telescope Array back online.
The Allen Telescope Array, or ATA, is a series of 42 linked radio-telescope dishes funded by a $30-million gift from Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen. Built at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in a valley near Mt. Shasta, it is the first group of radio telescopes built from the ground up with the intention of monitoring the universe full-time for radio waves that would indicate there is life on other planets.
The Allen Telescope Array against a rising Milky Way (SETI)
The ATA has been monitoring the universe consistently since 2008, but in April, SETI and its partner, the Radio Astronomy Lab of UC Berkeley, ran out of money and had to put the ATA into hibernation mode.
