Telescopes

• 100 Meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope

  

  © NRAO

  Targets: nearby stars; nearby galaxies.

  Green Bank is the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. Coupled with state-of-the-art detectors, electronics and data processing, it can focus on individual objects to achieve several thousand times better sensitivity than any previous SETI search.

• 64-metre diameter Parkes Telescope

  

  © CSIRO

  Targets: nearby stars; nearby galaxies; galactic plane of Milky Way.

  210-foot Parkes Observatory is a movable radio dish, the second largest telescope in the southern hemisphere. Its "multibeam" receiver can search 13 places in the sky simultaneously. A new "ultra wide-band receiver" system for Parkes is in construction. It will enable a search of an enormous range of the radio spectrum simultaneously: - 0.7 to 4.2 GHz.

• Automated Planet Finder Telescope at Lick Observatory

  

  © Laurie Hatch

  Targets: nearest 1000 stars; nearest 100 galaxies.

  As well as our radio searches, we are performing an innovative and comprehensive search for messages sent via laser.

  Lick’s state-of-the-art Automated Planet Finder, with its Levy Spectrometer, is ideal for finding laser communications not in the visible light range but across the spectrum from near infra-red to near ultra-violet. The instruments are so sensitive that they can detect a common industrial laser over interstellar distances.

• MeerKAT Radio Telescope

  

  Targets: one million nearby stars.

  The 64-antenna MeerKAT array is the mid-frequency precursor telescope for the Square Kilometre Array, and a powerful instrument in its own right. The addition of Breakthrough Listen instrumentation will enable a SETI search with an unprecedented combination of sensitivity, resolution and field of view on the sky, operating 24/7 and in parallel with other observations wherever the telescope is pointed.