Backyard Satellite Dishes Join Search for ET

The power of a sea of backyard satellite dishes will be harnessed in an attempt to listen for life on other planets.

The search, popularized by the movie “Contact,” is usually performed with massive satellite dishes, but this project will use about 750 dishes in a remote Northern California valley.

The project, which will take up to six years to build, was announced Feb. 8 by partners UC Berkeley and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View.

Using the humble backyard dish for such a lofty scientific search is the brainchild of astronomer Frank Drake, who in 1960 pioneered the use of radio telescopes to search for extraterrestrial life.

He came up with the idea while mulling over the problem of building big telescopes cheaply when his little 10-foot wide dish caught his eye. He suddenly envisioned hundreds of the white dishes, lined up side by side.

Better computer technology today is one reason the project may work. Before, it wasn’t effective to connect large numbers of antennae, but faster computers will help make sense of the hundreds of signals that will be recorded.

The researchers at UC and the SETI Institute plan to build Drake’s dream at the Hat Creek Observatory about 75 miles from Redding. UC has run the observatory, devoted to radio astronomy, since the early 1960s.

Using the commercially available dishes will also cut costs, UC Berkeley astronomer William Welch said. Building a dish with the equivalent power would cost more than $100 million. With the commercial dishes, he said, it will cost from $10 million to $15 million.

The system, made up of dishes between 12 and 18 feet wide, will be set down in a valley where there is little outside radio interference.