Breakthrough Listen Initiative

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Chinese Telescope Now Open to Foreign Scientists

April 15, 2021
ExoNews Editor

Article by Abhijnan Rej April 3, 2021 (thediplomat.com)

• China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (or ‘FAST’, pictured above) will now be available for use by foreign scientists, reported Chinese state media. “All foreign applications will be evaluated, and the results will be announced on July 20. Observations by international users will begin in August.”

• China’s Xinhua news agency quoted the telescope’s chief engineer as saying that 10 percent of observation time would be allocated to foreign scientists in the instrument’s first year of operations. “The project will contribute Chinese wisdom to the construction of a community with a shared future for humanity, and strive to promote international sci-tech development and the progress of human civilization.”

• FAST, located in China’s Guizhou province, is the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope and became fully operational January last year. While the telescope’s scientific uses are vast, its potential use to discover extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) that has attracted considerable attention.

• In October 2016, the privately-funded Breakthrough Listen initiative announced that researchers using FAST will collaborate with those using the Green Bank Telescope in (West Virginia) USA and the Parkes Observatory in NSW Australia to “exchange observing plans, search methods and data” in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

• “Are we alone?’ is a question that unites us as a planet,” said Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire financing the Breakthrough Initiatives. “And the quest to answer it should take place at a planetary level too. With this agreement, we are now searching for cosmic companions with three of the world’s biggest telescopes across three continents.”

• Milner drew considerable political attention amid allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election when Milner made substantial investments in Facebook and Twitter on behalf of two Russian state entities. Milner also held stakes in a company co-owned with Jared Kushner, former White House advisor and son-in-law of Donald Trump.

• In September 2019, Maura McLaughlin, a radio astronomer at West Virginia University who studies extra-galactic pulsars, said she was “super excited to be able to use the (FAST) telescope.” However, with the deterioration of China-U.S. relations, American scientists have come under considerable scrutiny amid allegations that they are – wittingly or not – being used by the Chinese Communist Party for technical and scientific espionage and intellectual property theft. The arrest of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineering professor in January on charges that he failed to adequately disclose his professional and financial ties with China added to an increasingly long list of experienced scientists who have been pursued by the US Department of Justice for their China links.

Chinese state media reported earlier this week that China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) will now be available for use by foreign scientists. According to Xinhua, based on a statement by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC), “All foreign applications will be evaluated, and the results will be announced on July 20. Observations by international users will begin in August.” This announcement confirms a January NAOC announcement that FAST would be open to astronomers around the world from April 1.

“The project will contribute Chinese wisdom to the construction of a community with a shared future for humanity, and strive to promote international sci-tech development and the progress of human civilization,” Xinhua quoted the statement as saying.

A separate January Xinhua story on FAST had quoted the telescope’s chief engineer as saying that 10 percent of observation time would be allocated to foreign scientists in the instrument’s first year of operations.

FAST, located in China’s Guizhou province, is the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope and became fully operational January last year. While the telescope’s scientific uses are vast – and the instrument had already been used to discover 100 new pulsars (fast-spinning dead stars that emit radio waves) in its test phase — it is its potential use to discover extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) that has attracted considerable attention, including from geopolitical analysts given to (farfetched) scenario planning.

In October 2016, NAOC and the privately-funded Breakthrough Listen initiative – which funds projects for astronomers to use radio telescopes around the world to search for ETI – announced their collaboration at a ceremony in Beijing. According to a Breakthrough Initiatives statement on the occasion, researchers using FAST will collaborate with those using the Green Bank Telescope in the U.S. and the Parkes Observatory in Australia to “exchange observing plans, search methods and data.”

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The ‘Very Large Array’ in NM Will Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Life

February 26, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Georgina Torbet February 15, 2020 (digitaltrends.com)

• A collaboration between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the SETI Institute will use the NRAO’s “Very Large Array” (VLA) of radio telescopes (with operations center in Socorro, New Mexico) to search for the presence of extraterrestrial life in the universe by such indicators as laser beams, structures built around stars, constructed satellites, or atmospheric chemicals produced by industry.

• In a statement, Andrew Siemion, Chair of the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, said “The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky. This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search.”

• NRAO Director Tony Beasley stated, “As the VLA conducts standard observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we’re already collecting.” “Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it.”

• Bill Diamond, President and CEO of the SETI Institute said that “Having access to the most sensitive radio telescope in the northern hemisphere for SETI observations is perhaps the most transformative opportunity yet in the history of SETI programs,” giving SETI researchers the opportunity to search further than ever before. “We are delighted to have this opportunity to partner with NRAO, especially as we now understand the candidate pool of relevant planets numbers in the billions.”

• [Editor’s Note] Well this should be a huge waste of time and money for a few more years as SETI continues to search the skies in bad faith, desperately trying not to actually find any sign life in the universe, which is its true deep state objective. For if SETI ever admitted that there are signs of an extraterrestrial presence all around us, and has been for decades if not millennia, then they would be exposed as the frauds they are and find themselves out of a job.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is getting a boost through a collaboration that will use existing

radio telescopes to search for indicators of life elsewhere in the universe.

A new collaboration has been announced between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the SETI Institute, to add SETI capabilities to the NRAO’s radio telescopes. To begin the project, an interface will be added to the NRAO’s Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico to search for events or structures which could indicate the presence of life, such as laser beams, structures built around stars, indications of constructed satellites, or atmospheric chemicals produced by industry.

“The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting

unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky,“ Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. “This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search.”

As well as adding the new interface, the data collected by the VLA will be analyzed for signs of life. “As the VLA conducts standard observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we’re already collecting,” NRAO Director Tony Beasley said in the statement. “Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it.”

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