SETI Detection Strategies for Single Dish Radio Telescopes

TL;DR

This paper proposes new detection strategies for SETI using single dish radio telescopes, addressing classical energy detector limitations through asynchronous observations and statistical modeling.

Contribution

It introduces novel detection methods based on asynchronous ON and OFF observations and provides statistical models for threshold setting and performance evaluation.

Findings

Enhanced detection capabilities over classical energy detectors

Statistical models enable better threshold selection

Strategies improve SETI search sensitivity

Abstract

Radio Searches for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence aim at detecting artificial transmissions from extra terrestrial communicative civilizations. The lack of prior knowledge concerning these potential transmissions increase the search parameter space. Ground-based single dish radio telescopes offer high sensitivity, but standard data products are limited to power spectral density estimates. To overcome important classical energy detector limitations, two detection strategies based on asynchronous ON and OFF astronomical target observations are proposed. Statistical models are described to enable threshold selection and detection performance assessment.