Articles

Bruce Betts

The Planetary Society Optical SETI (OSETI) Telescope was successfully upgraded and fully tested, and is now fully operational looking for aliens. Here are some updates on the performance and progress. In summary, the upgraded telescope is performing just as hoped and is scanning the skies.

Mat Kaplan

This week's Planetary Radio features artist Jon Lomberg inviting listeners to join the New Horizons Message Initiative.

Bruce Betts

The Planetary Society Optical SETI Telescope in Harvard, Massachusetts just got a major upgrade of its electronics.

Amir Alexander

A review of Robert H. Gray's

Charlene Anderson

Remember SETI@home? The ground-breaking computing project is now taking a look at candidate Earth-like planets that have been detected by NASA's Kepler space telescope.

Mike Malaska

Citizen Science projects let volunteers easily contribute to active science programs. They're useful when there is so much data it overwhelms computing algorithms (if they exist) or the scientific research team attempting to process it.

Bill Nye

If you or I ingest arsenic, well...it doesn't go so well. If you are, on the other hand, a certain species of bacterium from Mono Lake, California, ingesting this seemingly toxic metal is simple enough.

Jon Lomberg

Frank Drake used the 85' radio telescope at Green Bank to conduct the first modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in 1960. Using a very simple receiver and no computers, he listened to each of two sunlike stars for 100 seconds. Call that unit 1 Ozma.

Jon Lomberg

Today's sessions at the Ozma@50 conference stretched the mind as these multidisciplinary gatherings usually do.

Jon Lomberg

Jon Lomberg repots from NRAO--the National Radio Astronomy Observatory-- in Greenbank, West Virginia on a SETI workshop marking the 50th anniversary of Project Ozma.

Charlene Anderson

Planetary Society members have reason to celebrate today, with the on-line publication in Science of the discovery of a new pulsar by three citizen-scientists working with Einstein@home, a descendant of the SETI@home project.

Paul Horowitz

Often, the phrase “next steps” has been known to describe things that don't actually happen. But for The Planetary Society's All-sky Optical SETI, it's different. Here's what's happened in the last year.

Amir Alexander

If you were a member of an alien civilization trying to communicate across the immeasurable distances of space, how would you go about it?

Amir Alexander

Just when SETI@home is celebrating its 10th anniversary, its older brother, Project SERENDIP, is getting a general makeover.

Amir Alexander

One of the youngest off-springs of SETI@home has been getting a great deal of attention recently. Known as the Quake-Catcher Network (QCN), this distributed computing project makes use of thousands of volunteers' computers to locate and track earthquakes.

Amir Alexander

In the beginning was SETI@home, the first large-scale volunteer computing project, launched in 1999 with seed money from The Planetary Society. Within months the project had millions of volunteers around the world joining to form the most powerful computer network ever assembled.

Amir Alexander

A fully formed planetary system, with five different planets of varying sizes and orbits has been found, orbiting a star more than 40 light years away. Significantly, it is the very same star, 55 Cancri, that was one of the chief targets of the SETI@home reobservations at Arecibo in March 2003.

Bruce Betts

The Planetary Society's Optical SETI Telescope was built solely to search for possible light signals from alien civilizations. Located at Oak Ridge Observatory in Harvard, Massachusetts, it is the first dedicated Optical SETI telescope in the world. Its 72-inch primary mirror also makes it larger than any optical telescope in the U.S. east of the Mississippi river.

Amir Alexander

Winter time is observing time at the Oak Ridge Observatory in Massachusetts, when humidity is low and the sky is often clear. And so it has been for the Optical SETI telescope, which opened its doors in April 2006.

Amir Alexander

Located in the southern part of the continent of South America, Southern SETI has a continuous view of densest star-fields in our galaxy. And, since 1990, it has been sponsored and supported by The Planetary Society.