A Taiwanese research institute has plans to build a small satellite receiver array in Ka‘u to search for elusive signals from space.
At a meeting of the county’s Windward Planning Commission next month, the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics will request a special permit to operate an array of 10 satellite dishes on a one-half acre rural lot in Wood Valley.
“The dishes are the old type of television dish, like what people used to use to get DirectTV,” said Ming-Tang Chen, ASIAA’s deputy director for Hawaii Operations.
Chen said the project is very simple: The dishes will be pointed at the sky in the hopes of picking up fast radio bursts, a rare and little-understood astronomical phenomenon.
Fast radio bursts are fleeting but highly energetic pulses of radio waves generated by an as-yet-unknown astrophysical process — hypotheses about the origin of the bursts range from neutron stars, supernovas and alien civilizations.
First discovered in 2006, astronomers estimate fast radio bursts can release in a millisecond as much energy as the sun produces in three days.
“The hard part is that they’re random, and we don’t know where they’re coming from,” Chen said. “So, all we can do is wait for them to happen, staring in a fixed direction.”
Chen said the location in Ka‘u is important for the project’s viability. Because the dishes are simply waiting to receive radio signals, the array needs to be placed in an isolated area so as not to receive an overwhelming amount of data.
“If we put it in Hilo, we’d be getting extremely strong signals from all over,” Chen said.
ASIAA has secured a lease agreement with the owner of a 21.8-acre undeveloped lot in Wood Valley to use a half-acre portion of the property for five years, with the possibility of a five-year extension at the end of that period, Chen said. — According to Hawaii tax records, the landowner is Ray Mizuno.
The project would not be ASIAA’s first facility on the Big Island. The institute is a joint operator of the Submillimeter Array and a partner of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, both on Maunakea.
The Windward Planning Commission meeting will be held online at 9 a.m. on May 5.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.