The Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and UC Berkeley have been collaborating on SETI activities for several years now. Last year, we presented a talk titled "INAF - UC Berkeley collaboration on SETI" at IAC. Since then, there has been further progress, especially related to the future involvement of the 64-m Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) in the Breakthrough Listen (BL) program. BL already employs two of the largest radio telescopes in the world, with twenty percent dedicated telescope time to search for ETIs. One of the scientific goals of the BL program is a comprehensive search for intelligent life near the Galactic Center across 700 MHz to 100 GHz. For observations in the 18-26 GHz frequency range (K-band) with the GBT, weather conditions can have an extremely negative impact which could limit the number of observing hours, and such a frequency range cannot be covered by Parkes (which does not have an active surface). As a consequence, SRT can make a significant contribution with observing the Galactic Center together with the GBT. In this paper, after a brief description of SRT and its new developments, we present the status of our ongoing activities, which should enable us to begin these high-frequency observations within no more than six months.
展开▼
