Researchers from the Aricebo Wow! mission want to construct a community of low-cost radio telescopes primarily based on software-defined radio (SDR) dongles — within the hope of turning them into a cheap equal to the Massive Ear telescope used to pay attention for alien indicators within the Nineteen Seventies.
“A community of small radio telescopes affords a number of distinct benefits in comparison with giant skilled observatories,” the group explains of the mission, dubbed Wow@Dwelling after the well-known SETI@Dwelling distributed computing mission. “These methods are low-cost and might function autonomously across the clock, making them ultimate for steady monitoring of transient occasions or long-duration indicators that skilled telescopes can not decide to observing full-time.”
Fancy replicating the invention of the Wow! Sign? That is what Wow@Dwelling goals for. (📷: Aricebo Wow!)
The Wow@Dwelling mission is predicated on low-cost consumer-grade {hardware}: an RTL-SDR V4 receive-only software-defined radio dongle related to a Nooelec SAWbird+ H1 low-noise amplifier (LNA) and a mesh satellite tv for pc dish antenna. The {hardware} is drive by a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board pc, which helps to maintain the general price down — round $469 together with instruments and mounting {hardware}, excluding the price of a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
The mission is impressed by the “Massive Ear” at Ohio State College, which in August 1977 picked up what grew to become often known as the “Wow! Sign” — a powerful narrowband sign that was believed to originate within the Sagittarius constellation. Whereas the unique Massive Ear was shut down in 1997, the Wow@Dwelling equal would ship excessive scalability at a low price with no danger of a single level of failure — at, the researchers admit, decrease sensitivity.
“The Wow@Dwelling Radio Telescope operates autonomously, 24/7, as a meridian-style instrument, conducting a steady all-sky survey for transient occasions,” its creators clarify. “The {hardware} required to construct these telescopes is each cheap and extensively accessible, counting on available elements. The important ingredient lies within the software program, which should be able to analyzing information successfully, whether or not from a single station or throughout a coordinated community of telescopes.”
Extra data on the {hardware} setup, plus the Straightforward Radio Astronomy software program used to drive it, is offered on the mission web site.
