The antenna itself while nostalgic, is of no technical importance, and of zero interest to the public. The golf course and homes provide tax dollars that support the university(s) that create original research and educate new researchers. Clearly, a golf course and homes are a better way to new research than maintaining a crumbling white elephant. If there comes a time to dismantle Greenbank and disestablish the Reservation, then that too is logical and reasonable.
Let's just celebrate that the signal possibly just was of extraterrestrial origin. We will never know for sure as the signal was not observed again. Just a noise phenomenon as the origin? Perhaps. A signal from an extraterrestrial origin? Might have been exactly just that. It is a shame that the Big Ear was not put on the registry of historical places and preserved. It should have been, definitely so. What a shame to have plowed it under for a golf course. Shame, shame, shame.
Here is a photo of the Big Ear, designed by Dr John D Kraus - W8JK, courtesy of NASA. This was state-of-the-art technology for it's day. The Kraus Big Ear antenna had the performance of a 174 foot dish antenna. Impressive! What a shameful act to have destroyed this masterpiece of engineering technology.
The nature of science is verification, in this case either through redundancy or independent detection. Something clearly 'drifted' through the main beam of the telescope, once, with a very high intensity level. In fact, it did so in a 2 band comb. The fact that the response of the instrument was not 'mapped' for responses to overload is a failure of this observation as a scientific endeavor. IOW, nonlinearity response in the receiver chain were assumed to be irrelevant. Not a valid assumption. It is likely that the 'signal' was of circumterrestrial origin OR extraterrestrial origin. It is possible that it 'maps' a dual monochromatic source. It is likely that nonlinear overload of strong source could produce the detections. There is no evidence for modulation. Given the absence of information content, the ambiguities listed above, and the absence of redundancy or independent verification, on what basis can the hypothesis of an extraterrestrial intelligent signal be entertained? Kindly explain why these compelling issues justify an historical 'celebration'. I don't get it. 73 Chip W1YW
Amazing The Ohio State University still has St John's Arena and a 93 year old foot ball stadium. All of the antennas off of Kinnear Roadand North Star Road are also gone.
The hydrogen line at 1420 MHz is observed in radio astronomy because those radio waves can penetrate the large clouds of interstellar cosmic dust that are opaque to visible light. This is why we prohibit any transmissions at that frequency as it would interfere with radio astronomy observations. If an advanced civilization was likely to be aware of that fact, they might be just as likely to prohibit any transmissions at that frequency. Why would either think that some other intelligence would transmit on a frequency that is reserved for scientific receive only? Why did SETI think some other intelligent beings would blast out high power "hellos" to obliterate the ability to map the sky using this natural resonance of the hydrogen line? -- Just sayin'
There is a region from about 1000-1800 MHZ where the cosmic background noise is at a minimum. This 'natural' passband is where many cosmically prominent spectral lines exist, including the 21cm hydrogen line (at around 1420 MHz) and lines of OH at around 1612, 1665 ,and 1667 MHz. H +OH = H2O or water. Hence that is why this passband is dubbed the 'water hole'. SETI has long recognized that cosmically, narrow band transmissions have a SNR advantage if transmitted within the 'water hole' passband. Hydrogen and OH are considered good 'signposts' to transmit NEAR, not AT. Otherwise there is a lot of narrow band channels to cover in the water hole. To wit: if each ETI TX was 0.1 Hz wide, the water hole would require roughly 8 billion channels. And each channel would have independent noise characteristics of a Gaussian, which means that SOME NATURAL noise would have SNR's of, say 30:1, 20:1, 40:1. Better to narrow the search window and cut down on the likelihood of noise. IOW, no 'intelligent' civilization would transmit at the same frequencies as Doppler shifted HYDROGEN, but MAY transmit NEAR these frequencies , with these natural frequency 'signposts', taking advantage of the water hole. This is not my 'opinion'. It is the reason why, for 60 years, those frequencies have ben used for SETI. If you need a reference I will dig one out for you. 73 Chip W1YW
Or in other words, "if everyone is listening and no one is calling, they all think the band is dead" Dave W7UUU
Dave, I think what he means is why 'would you transmit on top of another radio source at that frequency?'. It would be like operating QRP on top of WWV But you could use WWV as a 'frequency signpost' to make yourself easier to find, say at 10.020 MHZ (if it was legal). Transmissions from Earth have been done at the water hole BTW.
Chip - it was humor. Ya know? Kinda like a joke sort of thing? You have heard of humor, haven't you? Dave W7UUU
