Archive for the ‘SETI’ Category

SETI Back Online Thanks To Crowdsourcing Effort

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

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SETI is officially back online, listening to the stars for intelligent, presumably chatty, life.

The project ended a seven month dark period caused when former partner the University of California at Berkley pulled out due to budget cuts. Faced with a world where cries from alien civilizations could fall on deaf ears, the institute decided to ask for public donations.

$230,000 later, we have our ears back to the train tracks.

“This morning, at 6:18, we began re-observing the Kepler worlds,” Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, said Monday during the Kepler Science Conference here at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “We’re just extremely excited to be back on the air today.”

The focus now as it was before the shut down are alien planet candidates observed from the Kepler telescope.

Welcome back SETI!

[SPACE.com]

Posted in Alien, SETI | 3 Comments »

SETI Shuts Down Allen Telescope Array

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) is out of money and is no longer listening for alien signals.  Aliens, you win this round; you may commence snooping around the solar system and broadcasting at will.

In an April 22 letter to donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson said that last week the array was put into “hibernation,” safe but nonfunctioning, because of inadequate government support.

The timing couldn’t be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite. They predict that dozens of these planets will be Earth-sized — and some will be in the “habitable zone,” where the temperatures are just right for liquid water, a prerequisite of life as we know it.

[Mercury News]

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