Now that the new FAST (Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope) telescope in southwest China is now up and running, will we be getting data sets from them to analyse? If, as they claim, it is three times as sensitive as the Arecibo observatory the details we could drag from the data they could send us would be astounding. When can we expect an update on this please?

Now that the new FAST (Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope) telescope in southwest China is now up and running, will we be getting data sets from them to analyse? If, as they claim, it is three times as sensitive as the Arecibo observatory the details we could drag from the data they could send us would be astounding. When can we expect an update on this please?

As you may have heard relations between the USA and China are not the best. Unfortunately politics sometimes gets in the way of science.

FAST has been collecting Breakthrough Listen Data for over three years. SETI@Home gets most of its data now from the Green Bank Breakthrough Listen receiver. There are plans to incorporate data from Parkes and FAST; Parkes is in development but there is no timeframe for FAST. But it's not like there isn't any significant SETI activity from FAST already.

By the way, SETI@Home only has the capacity to analyze one percent of the data from just the Green Bank source. There certainly may be plenty we're already missing, so it's arguable that further data sources are unnecessary when we can't even cope with a reasonable fraction of what we have now.

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Certainly another "equatorial" source is not required, what is currently not really covered is the Southern Hemisphere - hence the interest in data from Parkes.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?