Robert S Dixon

Ohio State University

Dixon attended graduate school at the Ohio State University in the early 1960s. He graduated as an electrical engineer and began working at the university. In his work at Ohio State University Dixon has served as both Assistant and Acting Director of the Ohio State University Radio Observatory, and directed the Ohio State SETI program from 1973 to 1997, which was the world's first full-time search for extraterrestrial radio signals using a large radio telescope. The program largely used a staff of volunteers, as well as professors, and remains the longest running search program in history.

The so-called Big Ear antenna used in the program was designed and built by John D. Kraus and previously used in the Ohio Sky Survey. The project was shut down in the late 1990s, when the university lost the lease on the property upon which the telescope was located. In the early 1990s,Dixon and students developed a new type of radio telescope array called Argus, which views much of the sky simultaneously. Argus was an early version of an Omnidirectional Search System. Dixon has also served as Chief Research Engineer for the Ohio Academic Resources Network. As a part of his work he has been a Faculty Fellow for Project Cyclops and Project OASIS for NASA.

Wow! signal

In his directorship over the project he was one of the first people to be shown the Wow! signal in 1977. He and its discoverer, Jerry R. Ehman, immediately began to analyse where the signal had come from and how it might have been produced. Only five months beforehand his work at Ohio State had been featured by New Scientist as uncertain and potentially unviable. One of the final articles on Dixon's work before the Wow! signal stated that, "The fact that no ... signal has shown up has not discouraged Dr. Dixon. There is a multitude of stars to investigate." After the Wow! signal this shifted substantially and by 1979 Dixon was quoted as saying that "SETI is a first step towards the growing up of mankind".

Methodologies

In 1983 Dixon and his research partner Charles A. Klein tried to shift their sky searches from FFT algorithms to the use of KLT, as KLT provided for a more efficient search methodology. However the computational requirements of KLT made its use too complex for astronomers to use as a part of the SETI program, and the computations were too complex for even the most advanced computers of the mid-1980s. Dixon and Dr. Mike Kline then developed the Bordered Autocorrelation Method for use in KLT computation in 1991.

Writing

In 1970, Dixon directed a project to create a master list of radio sources, which was published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement that July. In 1979 Dixon and John Kraus began publishing the quarterly magazine Cosmic Search, which was published for several years with a subscriber base of about 3,000 people in 50 different countries. In 1981 he produced a series of acetate overlays for the National Geographic Society – Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. Dixon's views on the subject of space exploration were published in the news, including SETI. In 1997 Dixon contributed the chapter "Argus: a next-generation omnidirectional radio telescope" in the book High Sensitivity Radio Astronomy. Dixon contributed the chapters "Project Cyclops: The Greatest Radio Telescope Never Built" and "A Sentry on the Universe" in the 2011 book Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.