The plan is to start with a few beams and increase their number as costs allow. Thomas Pierson, chief executive officer for the SETI Institute, says an important goal is to provide long-term upgrade capability. The Allen Telescope Array can be improved constantly, at relatively low cost. For instance, the telescope can be made more powerful by improving the software and incorporating new computing hardware, which continues to get better and less expensive. It can also be made more sensitive by adding more dishes.
Bigger projects are also in the works.
The final ATA itself should serve as a test bed for the much more ambitions Square Kilometer Array , an instrument that radio astronomers worldwide hope to build starting around 2008. It would be designed on the roughly same general principles as the ATA but would have 100 times the collecting area. The SETI Institute is also funding an effort at Ohio State University to push antenna-array technology one step further. Instead of dishes, each of its elements will be a simple small, fixed antenna sensitive to the entire sky. Aiming will be done entirely in software by combining signals from all the antennas through interferometry.