The next steps in Seti-Italia science and technology

The Italian Medicina Radioastronomy Station (nearby Bologna) is equipped with two antennas: the 32 mt (VLBI) dish and the Northern Cross, a large T-shaped parabolic/cylindrical antenna (30.000 sqm). So far Seti observations have been performed using a SERENDIP IV high resolution spectrometer connected to the VLBI dish in “piggy back” mode configuration. In order to facilitate data interpretation and to introduce innovative methods to search for possible extraterrestrial signals, we are planning to make use of the large UHF Northern Cross transit telescope. Sky observations performed at least within two months, could provide for each day a number of matrices labeled according to the observing sidereal time. The entire set of matrices will be characterized by an averaged spectrum on each row per day. Keeping constant the transit antenna declination, a coherent signal coming from a definite position of the sky, would produce a “flag on” in the same submatrix at the same sidereal time. Detections collected in this way could be considered “confirmed” since they always come from the same region of the sky and are observed regularly. An extremely powerful processing board based on a multi-FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array) core was developed and is now under programming. This is conceived to be the processing core for this new kind of investigations.