HOUSTON -- NASA will spend $4 million in 2003 designing and studying a new radio telescope array as a possible strategy for alleviating pressure on the agencys Deep Space Network communications system.

Advocates for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) hope NASA will permit the Mountain View, CA-based research group to use the new array to aid in its work, but a NASA spokesman said there are no plans to do that at this time.

"There is no plan at the moment to use this particular array for radio astronomy," which would include SETI work, said Guy Webster, a spokesman at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where engineers will design and study the test array.

If constructed, scientists would use the new array to communicate with space probes, which is DSNs traditional function, Webster said.

The new contract was revealed by a SETI advocate speaking at a session of the World Space Congress here. "NASA has finally listened to us," said Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

Tarter has long advocated construction of an array of radios dishes, which she calls the Square Kilometer Array. Dozens of separate radio dishes would be arranged to emulate a single giant telescope, she said.

The Square Kilometer Array would amount to a giant new ear in the search for radio transmissions from intelligent beings outside the solar system, she said. But Tarter said it also could enhance NASAs Deep Space Network of communications dishes.

"Were living in a video age and were receiving snapshots from Mars," she said.

With the new array, space probes could send data back to Earth faster and with smaller antennas, which would save mass for science instruments, she said.

"DSN has a big problem. [NASA managers] want to launch a lot more spacecraft but they dont have the capacity to bring the data down to them," Tarter said.

The test array likely will consist of 100 dishes, each 12-meters wide, Tarter said.