A4.1 "Rudolf Pesek Lecture” The First Decade of Breakthrough Listen

David MACMAHON

Chief Engineer, Breakthrough Listen, Radio Astronomy Lab, University of California at Berkeley

United States

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Announced in July 2015, the Breakthrough Listen initiative of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation set out to be humanity’s largest and most comprehensive search for intelligent life beyond Earth. After achieving first light at the end of that year on the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, USA, the project expanded to more and more telescopes around the world. Initially conceived and funded as a 10-year endeavour, its success has secured additional funding to at least 2030. The current portfolio of Breakthrough Listen’s partner observatories will be presented in chronological order along with a summary of the current observational and computational capabilities at each site. This will highlight the evolution of observing strategy from dedicated observations on single antennas to commensal observations on telescope arrays. Running a unified campaign across such a diverse range of facilities poses interesting technical challenges. Different facilities provide different points of entry to the signal path from the telescope as well as different ways of accessing and synchronizing observational metadata (e.g. sky position, frequency, calibration solutions) that are essential to give meaning to the signal path data. These challenges can be summarized as maximizing commonality and reuse while minimizing site specific customizations. Another challenge not often encountered in one’s days as a student is how to manage evolving trends in the electronics and computing industries. Systems that were state of the art when deployed 10 years ago are now on the verge of obsolescence, if not beyond it. Components that were readily available can suddenly become much more expensive and harder to source due to spikes in cryptocurrency mining or AI mega-projects consuming all the product that industry can produce. These challenges can be hard to foresee and often require unique solutions that do not generalize well, but if history is any guide, the overall trend of increasing computational capability per unit cost can be expected over time. Breakthrough Listen’s struggles with and solutions to all of these challenges will be discussed. After this retrospective look back on Breakthrough Listen’s history we will look forward to what we can achieve in the future. New technologies and increased computational capabilities along with paradigm changing telescope facilities offer exciting new prospects for expanding humanity’s search for intelligent life beyond Earth to ever higher levels. We will survey some near-term possibilities and chart a course for next steps.