WHAT WE DO


JOINRENEWJOIN

Year in Space Calendar
  

Projects: SETI Radio Searches

Basic Facts

From its inception in 1980, The Planetary Society was there to support radio SETI. As early as 1981, when Senator Proxmire sought to cancel the NASA SETI program, The Planetary Society stepped in and helped secure funding for the project for another decade. With help from film-maker Steven Spielberg of E.T. fame, the society provided Harvard physicist Paul Horowitz with funds for his “Suitcase SETI.” This project was unique at the time in that the hardware could be transported from one radio telescope to another. With Planetary Society funding Horowitz later started project META (Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay), which was later upgraded to BETA (Billion channel Extraterrestrial Assay). Both made use of the 84 foot radio telescope at the Oak Ridge Observatory in Harvard, Massachusetts.

Arecibo Observatory
Click to enlarge >
Arecibo Observatory
The 300 meter (1000 foot) dish of the Radio Telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
Credit: NAIC - Arecibo Observatory, a facility of the NSF

In 1996 The Planetary Society joined forces with Dan Werthimer and his U.C. Berkeley SETI group in supporting project SERENDIP, which collects data using a receiver permanently perched above the giant dish at Arecibo. When SERENDIP evolved into the wildly successful SETI@home project, which relies on millions of personal computer users worldwide to process its data, it was The Planetary Society that made it all possible. By providing the project’s seed money The Planetary Society became its founding sponsor, and has been constant in its support ever since.

Most people on Earth live in the northern hemisphere, and it is therefore not surprising that that’s where most SETI searches take place. But it is the southern hemisphere that has a better view of the galactic plane of the Milky Way, and that suggests to SETI scientists that it is a good place to look for alien transmissions. Accordingly, The Planetary Society has sponsored Southern SETI, a project that since 1990 has used an exact copy of the META system developed by Paul Horowitz in his SETI project at the Oak Ridge Observatory in Massachusetts. Southern SETI searches the sky using a 30 meter dish at the Argentine Institute of Radio Astronomy, 35 kilometers (30 miles) south of Buenos Aires.

Today, with backing from The Planetary Society, Southern SETI is gearing up for a giant leap forward. If funding becomes available, Southern SETI will replace META II with a new system called SERENDIP V, designed and built by Dan Werthimer’s U.C. Berkeley team of SETI@home fame. Once in place, the new system will increase the number of channels Southern SETI can monitor by 15-30 times, and the overall range of frequencies by 325-650 times! In addition, SERENDIP V, unlike META II, is portable, and can be attached to other radio telescopes around the world.