Back in April, we reported on how a collaboration between the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Breakthrough Listen Initiative, and the SETI Institute planned to use the new Five-hundred-meter Aperture radio Telescope (FAST) to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. We now caught up with another of the project scientists to flesh out some more details of their observational plans and what observations they hope to make in the future.
FAST took in its first light in 2016, and was fully commissioned in January of 2020, but the project has been used exclusively by local Chinese scientists so far. That is about to change in the coming year, and many groups, including those interested in SETI are ready to submit proposed observational plans that would make use of FAST’s extraordinarily high sensitivity, which is 2.5x more than the next best radio telescope available.
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