The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Wide-bandwidth Digital Instrumentation for the CSIRO Parkes 64-m Telescope
Danny C. Price, David H. E. MacMahon, Matt Lebofsky, Steve Croft,, David DeBoer, J. Emilio Enriquez, Griffin S. Foster, Vishal Gajjar, Nectaria, Gizani, Greg Hellbourg, Howard Isaacson, Andrew P. V. Siemion, Dan Werthimer,, James A. Green, Shaun Amy, Lewis Ball

TL;DR
This paper describes the digital data recording system developed for the Breakthrough Listen project at the Parkes Telescope, enabling wide-bandwidth observations to search for extraterrestrial signals.
Contribution
It introduces a new digital instrumentation system with multiple recording modes tailored for the Parkes Telescope, supporting current and future wide-bandwidth observations.
Findings
System successfully records wide-bandwidth data
Supports multiple observation modes including future upgrades
Initial performance results demonstrate system capability
Abstract
Breakthrough Listen is a ten-year initiative to search for signatures of technologies created by extraterrestrial civilizations at radio and optical wavelengths. Here, we detail the digital data recording system deployed for Breakthrough Listen observations at the 64-m aperture CSIRO Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia. The recording system currently implements two recording modes: a dual-polarization, 1.125 GHz bandwidth mode for single beam observations, and a 26-input, 308-MHz bandwidth mode for the 21-cm multibeam receiver. The system is also designed to support a 3 GHz single-beam mode for the forthcoming Parkes ultra-wideband feed. In this paper, we present details of the system architecture, provide an overview of hardware and software, and present initial performance results.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
