This spring, the Allen Telescope Array, or ATA, a cluster of 42 radio astronomy dishes about 300 miles north of San Francisco, became the latest science casualty of California’s budget crisis, when the University of California, Berkeley, pulled its funding for the project. The ATA had operated as a listening station for alien transmissions for four years, and its loss was to be a significant hit to our hopes of finding little green men.
Within a few months, however, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (which ran the ATA with UC) managed to raise $200,000 through public donations, enough to keep the telescope going for the near future.
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