A Technosignature Survey Of The Anti-Solar Point: The SETI Institute's Largest-Ever Campaign With The Allen Telescope Array

@misc{gerrard2026technosignature,
  title = {{A Technosignature Survey Of The Anti-Solar Point: The SETI Institute's Largest-Ever Campaign With The Allen Telescope Array}},
  author = {Isabel Gerrard and Sofia Z. Sheikh},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.07065},
  eprint = {2610.07065},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07065},
}

TY  - UNPB
TI  - A Technosignature Survey Of The Anti-Solar Point: The SETI Institute's Largest-Ever Campaign With The Allen Telescope Array
AU  - Isabel Gerrard
AU  - Sofia Z. Sheikh
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/05
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.07065
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07065
AB  - The ATA-ASP campaign is a radio technosignature survey of the Anti-Solar Point as a "Schelling point", using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). We borrow from game theory the concept of Schelling points to hypothesize spacetime coordinates where both we and an extraterrestrial agent might send and search for a signal. From the perspective opposite the Sun, an extraterrestrial agent could detect Earth transiting within the habitable zone, thus this Anti-Solar Point (ASP) poses a shared and salient Schelling point. This campaign uses the ATA, tuned to 2356-3700 MHz, to observe Earth's ecliptic, and searches for sky-localized, narrowband, Doppler-drifting signals. Analysis is conducted using the Allen Telescope Survey Agnostic Technosignature pipeline (ATSAT), which integrates software packages bliss and NBeamAnalysis with radio frequency interference removal and outputs spectrograms. Narrowband signals and their Doppler-drift rates indicate technological and distant origin, while comparing beamformed beams localizes signals to the ASP. The plots are visually inspected and cataloged into six signal morphologies to distinguish potential signals-of-interest and radio frequency interference. To date, the survey has observed approximately 12% of the projected coordinate coverage over 126 observations; 67% of sessions have been analyzed, producing more than 11,000 plots, all of which have been inspected and 75% labeled. 25 of these labeled spectrograms contain narrowband drifting signals sky-localized to the ASP, and the 10 corresponding coordinates will be re-observed. Although SETI literature has long proposed searching for beacons at the ASP, this campaign provides the first observational coverage. Observing Earth's ecliptic will require a multi-year effort and produce over 11 petabytes of data, making it the ATA's largest survey ever.
ER  -