The TEST Manhattan Project was announced by progodlegend in the State Of The Alliance on April 1st, 2017. Despite being announced on April Fools Day, it was no joke. The intent of the project was to mine enough compressed ore for the alliance to build a sizeable cache of dreads and FAXes. This was to be accomplished by voluntary mining and donating of ISK, salvage and compressed ore by individual TEST linemembers to the alliance.
Directly after the SOTA finished, progodlegend took out a mining fleet which included battleships fitted with mining lasers. Again, not a April Fools joke.
The Manhattan Project took place during the time period of one month. The lofty goal was to mine roughly 600 billion ISK worth of compressed ore. The final tally what the alliance managed to produce in the end is a little murky but the number of 400 billion was thrown around by leadership.