US STARTS PROJECT TO FIND ALIEN LIFE

[Dennis]

US STARTS PROJECT TO FIND ALIEN LIFE
Yahoo!7
May 14, 2011, 1:11 pm

The United States has inaugurated a massive radio telescope to listen for and tap signs of alien life on 86 "Earth-like" planets, astronomers have said.

The huge steerable radio dish installed in rural West Virginia has begun functioning to gather round-the-clock data on each of the planets, identified from a list of 1,235 possible planets.

"It's not absolutely certain that all of these stars have habitable planetary systems, but they're very good places to look for ET," Andrew Siemion, one of the scientists working on the project, was quoted by PressTV as saying.

The telescope will reportedly stare for about five minutes at each of the candidate planet's main star.

This star will help establish if the selected planet has a surface temperature at which liquid water could be maintained.

"We've picked out the planets with nice temperatures – between zero and 100 degrees Celsius – because they are a lot more likely to harbor life," said physicist Dan Werthimer, chief scientist for SETI@home and a veteran SETI researcher.

The project will likely take about a year to complete, and will be helped by a team of one million at-home astronomers, known as SETI@home users, who will help process the data on personal computers.

[veebee]

sounds good ! when does this particular project start up ????

We shall have to keep an eye on the SETI boards I suppose - it would be a good project for B@A to get stuck into from the "get-go"     ..... JMHO.

[Mysteron347]

Well, I can appreciate the science.

Problem shared with SETI is that even if there was incontrovertible scientific proof of alien life, the maniac contingent would be out demonstrating and bombing because you couldn't produce the little green men by the end of the week.

[Dennis]

Got a bit more information:

From the Hidustan Times (India):
Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley are aiming a radio telescope to detect signals of alien life on 86 possible Earth-like planets. The search began on Saturday, May 8, when the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope - the largest steerable radio telescope in the world – dedicated an
hour to eight stars with possible planets.

Sydney Morning Herald:

Last month the SETI Institute announced it was shuttering a major part of its efforts -- a 50 million dollar project with 42 telescope dishes known as the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) -- due to a five million dollar budget shortfall.

ATA began in 2007 and was operated in partnership by the UC Berkeley Radio Astronomy Lab, which has hosted several generations of such experiments. It was funded by the SETI Institute and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

With ATA's dishes in hibernation for now, astronomers hope the powerful Green Bank Telescope, a previous incarnation of which was felled in a windstorm in 1988, will provide targeted information about potential life-supporting planets.

"Our search employs the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and the most sensitive radio telescope in the world capable of undertaking a SETI search of this kind," Siemion told AFP.

"We will be looking at a much wider range of frequencies and signal types than has ever been possible before," he added, describing the instrumentation as "at the very cutting edge of radio astronomy technology."

The surface of the telescope is 100 by 110 meters and it can record nearly one gigabyte of data per second, Siemion said.

The 17 million pound (7.7 million kilogram) telescope became operational in 2000 and is a project of the NSF's National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

"We've picked out the planets with nice temperatures -- between zero and 100 degrees Celsius -- because they are a lot more likely to harbor life," said physicist Dan Werthimer.

Werthimer heads a three-decade long SETI project in Puerto Rico, home of the world's largest radio telescope, Arecibo. However that project could not observe the same area of the northern sky as the Green Bank telescope, he said.

"With Arecibo, we focus on stars like our Sun, hoping that they have planets around them that emit intelligent signals," Werthimer said in a statement.

"But we've never had a list of planets like this before."

The Green Bank Telescope can scan 300 times the range of frequencies that Arecibo could, meaning that it can collect the same amount of data in one day that Arecibo could in one year.

The project will likely take about a year to complete, and will be helped by a team of one million at-home astronomers, known as SETI@home users, who will help process the data on personal computers.

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/05/13/uc-berkeley-seti-survey-focuses-on-kepler%E2%80%99s-top-earth-like-planets/

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=64020

[Mike Mitchell]

The 17 million pound (7.7 million kilogram) telescope became operational in 2000 and is a project of the NSF's National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Isn't that $26 million  (Wow, not that long ago it would have been $34 million  ).