"into dry dock"

[neufer]

Lack of money shuts down search for alien life
By San Jose Mercury News and The Associated Press

<<If E.T. phones Earth, he'll get a "disconnect" signal.

Lacking the money to pay its operating expenses, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., has pulled the plug on the renowned Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes that resemble giant dinner plates. The radio dishes in the Northern California mountains scan the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

In a letter Friday to donors, SETI Institute Chief Executive Tom Pierson said the array last week was put into "hibernation," safe but nonfunctioning, because of inadequate government support. The timing couldn't be worse, SETI scientists say. Astronomers this spring said 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite. Fifty or 60 of those planets appear to be about the right distance from stars to have temperatures that could make them habitable, Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the institute, said Tuesday.

"There's plenty of cosmic real estate that looks promising," he added. "We've lost the instrument that's best for zeroing in on these better targets."

The $50 million Allen Telescope Array was built by SETI and University of California, Berkeley with the help of a $30 million donation from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Operating the dishes cost about $1.5 million a year, mostly to pay for a staff of eight to 10 researchers and technicians to operate the facility. An additional $1 million a year is needed to collect and sift data from the dishes. The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the billionaire's philanthropic venture, had no immediate plans to provide more funding to the facility, said David Postman, a foundation spokesman.

"I know [Allen] still hopes the work can be restarted at some point," Postman added. "We partnered with Berkeley and SETI for more than 10 years. ... We are proud of the technology that was developed ... [and] maintain hope that funding for continued operations will be found."

The SETI Institute was founded in 1984 and has received funding from NASA, the National Science Foundation, California and several other federal programs and private foundations. But the National Science Foundation and the state of California, among others, have cut funding severely. SETI Director Jill Tarter said she hopes the Air Force will help, because the array can be used to track satellite-threatening debris in space. But budgets are tight there as well.

The SETI Institute's mission is to explore the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. This is a profound search, institute officials believe, because it explains Earth's place among the stars. The 42 radio dishes, on U.S. Forest Service land near Mount Lassen, had scanned deep space since 2007 for signals from alien civilizations.

Shostak compared the project's suspension to "the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria being put into dry dock. ... This is about exploration, and we want to keep the thing operational. It's no good to have it sit idle. "We have the radio antennae up, but we can't run them without operating funds. Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company."

Despite the shutdown of the Allen Telescope Array, the search for E.T. will go on using other telescopes, such as a dish at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, the largest radio telescope in the world, Shostak said. The difference, he said, was that SETI researchers can point the Arecibo telescope at selected sites in space for only about two weeks a year. While the telescope in Northern California is not as powerful, it could be devoted to the search year-round.

Meanwhile, other SETI projects will continue, such as the "setiQuest Explorer" (http://www.setiquest.org), an application that allows citizen-scientist volunteers to look for patterns from existing data that might have been missed by existing algorithms. Through a new partnership with "Galaxy Zoo" (http://www.galaxyzoo.org), this project runs in real time, so discoveries can be followed up on immediately.>>

[Ann]

Click to view full size image

Seek, and ye shall find. There may still be water out there, even aliens who prefer their beer with a little more zing in it.

Ann

[bystander]

SETI survey focuses on Kepler’s top Earth-like planets
University of California, Berkeley | 2011 May 13

Now that NASA’s Kepler space telescope has identified 1,235 possible planets around stars in our galaxy, astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, are aiming a radio telescope at the most Earth-like of these worlds to see if they can detect signals from an advanced civilization.

Robert C Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia [i](Courtesy NRAO)[/i]

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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. Once UC Berkeley astronomers acquire 24 hours of data on a total of 86 Earth-like planets, they’ll initiate a coarse analysis and then, in about two months, ask an estimated 1 million SETI@home users to conduct a more detailed analysis on their home computers.

“It’s not absolutely certain that all of these stars have habitable planetary systems, but they’re very good places to look for ET,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Andrew Siemion.

The Green Bank telescope will stare for about five minutes at stars in the Kepler survey that have a candidate planet in the star’s habitable zone – that is, the 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.

Werthimer leads a 30-year-old SETI project on the world’s largest radio telescope, the Arecibo receiver in Puerto Rico, which feeds data to SETI@home for a detailed analysis that could only be done on the world’s largest distributed computer.

“With Arecibo, we focus on stars like our sun, hoping that they have planets around them that emit intelligent signals,” he said. “But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before.”

Werthimer also was involved with a SETI project that used the previous Green Bank telescope, which collapsed from structural failure in 1988.

“It’s really amazing that SETI is able to come back home to Green Bank where project Ozma, the first SETI observations, took place 51 years ago,” said Green Bank scientist Ronald Maddalena. “We now have a sensitivity that was undreamt of when Frank Drake ran his experiment in 1960.”

Werthimer also conducted a brief SETI project using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), which hosted a broader search for intelligent signals from space run by the SETI Institute of Mountain View, Calif. The SETI Institute’s search ended last month when the ATA went into hibernation mode after the institute and UC Berkeley ran out of money to operate it.

Wealth of data from Green Bank telescope

The radio dish in rural West Virginia was needed for the new search because the Arecibo dish cannot view the area of the northern sky on which Kepler focuses. But the Green Bank telescope also offers advantages over Arecibo. UC Berkeley’s SETI observations piggyback on other astronomical observations at Arecibo, and is limited in the wavelength range it can observe, which centers on the 21 centimeter (1420 MHz) line where hydrogen emits light. These wavelengths easily pass through the dust clouds that obscure much of the galaxy.

“Searching for ET around the 21 centimeter line works if civilizations are broadcasting intentionally, but what if planets are leaking signals like ‘I Love Lucy’?” Werthimer said. “With a new data recorder on the Green Bank telescope, we can scan a 800 megaHertz range of frequencies simultaneously, which is 300 times the range we can get at Arecibo.”

Thus, one day on the Green Bank telescope provides as much data as one year’s worth of observations at Arecibo: about 60 terabytes (60,000 gigabytes) in all, Siemion said. If they recorded a similar chunk of the radio spectrum from Arecibo, SETI@home would be overwhelmed with data, since the Arecibo sky survey observes nearly full time for years on end.

“It’s also great that we will completely span the water hole, a canonical place to look for intentional signals from intelligent civilizations,” Siemion said.

Gathering at the water hole

[attachment=0]keplercandidates.jpg[/attachment]

The water hole is a relatively quiet region of the radio spectrum in the universe and a range of wavelengths not significantly absorbed by material between the stars and galaxies. The water hole is bounded on one end by the 21 cm emissions from neutral hydrogen and on the other by the 18 cm emissions from the hydroxyl ion (OH). Because life is presumed to require the existence of liquid water, and water is composed of hydrogen and hydroxyl, this range was dubbed the water hole and seen as a natural window in which water-based life forms would signal their existence. That makes the water hole is a favorite of SETI projects.

“This is an interesting place, perhaps a beacon frequency, to look for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations,” Siemion added.

The 86 stars were chosen from the 1,235 candidate planetary systems – called Kepler Objects of Interest, or KOIs with the help of Kepler team member Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley’s targets include the 54 KOIs identified by the Kepler team as being in the habitable temperature range and with sizes ranging from Earth-size to larger than Jupiter; 10 KOIs not on the Kepler team’s habitable list but with orbits less than three times Earth’s orbit and orbital periods greater than 50 days; and all systems with four or more possible planets. After the Green Bank telescope has targeted each star, it will scan the entire Kepler field for signals from planets other than the 86 targets.

A coarse analysis of the data by Werthimer and his team will be followed by a more thorough analysis by SETI@home users, who will be able to see whether they are analyzing Green Bank data as opposed to Arecibo data. The complete analysis for intelligent signals could take a year, Werthimer said.

“If you extrapolate from the Kepler data, there could be 50 billion planets in the galaxy,” he said. “It’s really exciting to be able to look at this first batch of Earth-like planets.”

[rstevenson]

... Because life is presumed to require the existence of liquid water, ... this range was dubbed the water hole and seen as a natural window in which water-based life forms would signal their existence. ...

Yes. Sounds logical. But are we signalling our existence in that water hole?

Rob

[bystander]

The search for alien intelligence: SETI is dead — long live SETI
Nature News | M. Mitchell Waldrop | 2011 July 27

The closure of the Allen Telescope Array shifts the search for extraterrestrial intelligence away from big science.

Out where the Hat Creek Valley twists among the ancient lava fields north of California's Lassen Peak, the only sounds are the wind and the lowing of distant cattle. The soft growl of antenna motors has long since fallen silent; all 42 radio dishes of the Allen Telescope Array stand motionless in the hot summer sun, staring blindly at the mountains on the southern horizon.

The grass growing around their mounts — its neatness once a point of pride for observatory staff — is getting shaggy. The two caretakers still on site at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory don't have the resources to keep it trimmed. For nearly four years, these dishes listened for radio signals from an alien civilization. But since April, when the state's budget crisis forced the University of California, Berkeley, to suspend operations at the observatory, the world's largest instrument dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been left in limbo. If the money cannot be found to reopen the array, the 6-metre antennas will have to be dismantled and removed.

The melancholy vista at Hat Creek makes it easy to entertain equally melancholy thoughts about the SETI enterprise itself. It's the ultimate in high-risk, high-payoff science, pursued by only a handful of passionate researchers. In 50 years of searching, they have turned up nothing — and they can't quite shake an association in the public mind with flying-saucer sightings and Hollywood science fiction, all of which is so easy for cost-cutting politicians to ridicule that any substantial federal funding for SETI is impossible. Private support for the search is getting tighter because of the global recession. And many of the pioneers who have championed the search are now well into their 60s, 70s or 80s.

Given all that, what kind of future can SETI have? Quite a vigorous one, insist the SETI researchers. By nature they are an optimistic lot, given to taking the long view. "I'm a Pollyanna" about raising the money to restart the Allen array, declares Jill Tarter, head of the search programme at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California — the nonprofit research organization that conceived the array, operated it in partnership with astronomers at Berkeley and is now seeking the funds to resurrect it. Besides, the array is only one SETI initiative among many.

"If it closes I'll be sad for my colleagues at the SETI Institute," says Daniel Werthimer, a radio astronomer at Berkeley who runs several SETI surveys using data from the 305-metre radio dish at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, "but that's not going to affect us here." Or elsewhere: smaller, cheaper SETI searches are currently being conducted on telescopes around the world ( see slideshow ). Some are seeking alien radio beacons, whereas others are looking for the flicker of interstellar communication lasers. Some projects are looking at specific stars that seem likely to host Earth-like planets; others are doing a less sensitive but broader scan of the entire sky in the hope of catching signals of a type not yet conceived.

The reason to keep going is in that plethora of projects, says Frank Drake, an early pioneer of SETI studies and now an 81-year-old emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Our Galaxy is vast. The fraction searched so far is tiny. And the conceivable modes of alien communication are myriad. So there are always new possibilities to explore. Or, as Tarter likes to put it, giving up now would be like dipping a cup into the Pacific Ocean, finding nothing but clear water and declaring, 'the oceans have no fish'.

Intelligence test

From this wider perspective, the closing of the Allen array would mark the end of a 'big science' approach to SETI, but not of SETI itself. And, as the array's creators ruefully admit, even that approach might have succeeded — if it were not for their own early miscalculations.

Like every modern SETI effort, the Allen array follows the path blazed by Drake in 1960, when he was a staff astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, and managed to wangle 200 hours of telescope time to mount the first search for alien signals. Focusing on just two of the closest Sun-like stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, his Project Ozma yielded nothing but static. But Drake's effort got some prestigious support from physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who had independently come to the same conclusion he had: that massive new radio telescopes like the ones at Green Bank could detect potential alien signals across interstellar distances (G. Cocconi and P. Morrison Nature 184, 844-846; 1959).

Between Drake, Cocconi and Morrison, SETI gained instant scientific credibility, which began to draw other scientists into the field. "I realized I was part of the first generation that didn't have to ask a priest the 'Are we alone?' question," says Tarter, who committed her career to SETI in 1971 at the age of 27, after reading NASA's first major report on the subject.

For advocates, the obvious next step was a large-scale, federally funded effort to listen for aliens in as much of the Galaxy as technology allowed. This was a tough sell in Congress, says Drake. "Their first question is, 'How long will it take?', and you can't tell them." Then they ask how much it will cost — and that depends on how long it takes. "So you can't guarantee success," says Drake, "and you're asking them for a blank cheque."

But the SETI advocates persevered, and in October 1992 the first phase of NASA's US$12-million-per-year SETI search, dubbed the High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS), got under way at Arecibo, targeted at the 1,000 nearest Sun-like stars.

A year later it was dead: Senator Richard Bryan (Democrat, Nevada) engineered a bill cancelling the HRMS as an utter waste of taxpayers' money. "The Great Martian Chase may finally come to an end," he proclaimed. From then on, says Tarter, "we became the 4-letter 'S-word' at NASA headquarters".

The SETI Institute moved quickly to pick up the pieces. It had been founded in 1984 by scientists from NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and had been managing the first phase of the HRMS under contract to Ames. So it had no problem hiring many of the NASA employees who had been working on the programme, and arranging to use the custom-built signal analysers that NASA had already paid for. (These devices were designed to scan radio-telescope data for extremely narrow-band emissions, which were presumed to be the technological signature of an alien civilization; all known natural radio sources have a much broader bandwidth.)

"We sponsored a big series of workshops between 1997 and 1999 on what the future of SETI ought to be," says Drake, who served as the first chairman of the SETI Institute's board of trustees, and is still a board member. One of the prime recommendations was the construction of a large array of small, high-quality radio telescopes that could be dedicated full-time to SETI surveys. As in any radio array, the signals from all the antennas could be combined to look as though they came from a single antenna covering the same area — in this case, spanning 10,000 square metres, or one hectare. The One Hectare Telescope, as it was then known, became the SETI Institute's top priority.

To help create it, the institute enlisted the telescope-building expertise of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at Berkeley, where researchers were interested in using the array for conventional surveys of galactic and extragalactic radio sources in parallel with SETI. The partners agreed that the institute would raise the money to build the array, and that Berkeley would design it and pay for 20 years of operation at Hat Creek.

And that, looking back, was when the miscalculations started. "The Allen array was born in a time of irrational exuberance, and ended in the great recession," says Geoffrey Bower, a radio astronomer at Berkeley who was deeply involved in designing the array. "Those two play a big role in how it was imagined, and now how it's coming to an end."

A prime example of over-optimism was the antenna design. The original concept, proposed by Drake, was to use commercial satellite-television dishes as a way to keep the initial antenna cost to an absolute minimum. He had been inspired by a 3-metre dish that he had bought and assembled himself for $600, and that still stands behind his house in the hills near Santa Cruz. "It has receivers on it as good as any radio telescope," he says. For the array, which was intended to have 350 antennas, Drake found a commercial manufacturer in Wisconsin that would sell him 4.2-metre dishes — good enough, he felt — for about $1,100 apiece.

But that plan was quickly set aside as the Berkeley team came up with multiple innovations for optimizing performance. Less noise in the receivers. A wider frequency range. More-sensitive measurements of the radio waves' polarization. More sophisticated electronics.

Tarter and her colleagues at the SETI Institute endorsed these design decisions. But the attempt to do so many new things inevitably led to overruns and delays. The result, despite other innovations to minimize the price tag, was a design for 6-metre antennas that would cost at least $200,000 apiece. "If we had just reduced the technical complexity of the telescopes early in the project," says Bower, "we could have built hundreds of them."

They might have been able to do so anyway — except that the SETI Institute was beginning to realize that it might not have been such a good idea to start the project without getting all the money up front. "We're scientists," sighs Tarter. "What did we know?"

The first $25 million was easy enough to raise through the institute's contacts in the computer industry. Paul Allen, co-founder of the software powerhouse Microsoft, promised to contribute that much towards design and construction, and the facility was renamed the Allen Telescope Array. But by the time Allen's first instalment of funds arrived in 2001, the industry was reeling from the collapse of the dot-com boom, making further donations harder to come by. And those computer-industry philanthropists who were still giving, preferred to fund projects with a nearer-term, more tangible payoff. "We don't have patients we can cure," says Thomas Pierson, the SETI Institute's chief executive, summing up the problem.

In the end, the institute was able to raise only about $50 million in total, roughly $60 million shy of what it would need to pay for all 350 dishes. The array began operations in 2007 with just 42 antennas. This lack of collecting area greatly slowed down the alien-hunting. And worse, it left the array without the sensitivity required for cutting-edge radio astronomy — a fact cited by the National Science Foundation in 2008 when it declined to renew the grant that the university had been using to fund Hat Creek operations. Suddenly, Berkeley had no way to pay the array's $2.5-million annual operating costs.

The partnership managed to limp along for a few more years. But its increasingly urgent efforts to find a permanent source of funding ran headlong into the worldwide economic downturn and California's resulting budget crisis. On 22 April 2011, Berkeley and the SETI Institute were forced to pull the plug on Hat Creek.

The search continues

Berkeley doesn't hold out much hope of reopening the array, and has started to look at other radio-astronomy projects. "We've poured everything we had into the array," says Bower, "and really hit a wall with it."

The SETI Institute, though, is still trying. In June, it launched an experiment in 'crowd-sourced' funding on a website called SETIstars.org, through which individual supporters can make donations of $10–1,000. The hope is to raise a few hundred thousand to a million dollars per year that way (the take so far is just over $100,000). The institute is also in ongoing talks with the US Air Force, which is interested in providing some operations money in return for part-time use of the array to track debris in orbit around Earth.

But if the closure proves to be permanent, say institute officials, their plan B is to fall back on smaller-scale efforts — in effect, turning to the methods that the rest of the SETI community has followed all along. This approach tends to be very ad hoc and informal, says Werthimer. It's done with limited funding, borrowed telescope time and investigators who, like Werthimer himself, do SETI only part-time. "And that's the way it should be," says Werthimer. "It's naive to think that we know what ET, a billion years ahead of us, is going to be doing. So we want to be a small-scale science, trying lots of things."

Data from the Arecibo telescope, for example, are sent to five receivers at once: three doing conventional radio surveys, and two, operated by Werthimer's group, doing SETI. At the Oak Ridge Observatory in Harvard, Massachusetts, Paul Horowitz — a Harvard University astronomer — and his students are searching for extraterrestrial laser pulses with a small optical telescope, built for the search with roughly $300,000 from nonprofit organizations.

"I see SETI as a terrific thing for a graduate student," says Horowitz. "It's an unploughed field." Students can think up a plausible mode of extraterrestrial communication; design, build and test a detector; analyse the data; and get tangible, hands-on experience. Most students in conventional astronomy just get observation time on a big, institutional telescope. "When I first heard what Dan was doing — wow! I couldn't imagine doing anything else," says Andrew Siemion, who is writing his PhD thesis on SETI instrumentation under Werthimer.

Perhaps this is the lesson from the mothballed array at Hat Creek: the odds against success with SETI are so long that it is best done as a small-science, part-time pursuit. Or perhaps not: the SETI Institute may yet find a way around all the funding woes and political headwinds, and bring the Allen array back to life.

Either way, SETI is not going to disappear. "I went into SETI because it was just too cool not to," says Horowitz. And others will too, he says. "All you need is a university environment, with a few tenured faculty willing to host something wacko. The question is always interesting, and there will always be people willing to take a long shot."

[bystander]

SETI's telescopes to go back online, resuming hunt for alien life
PhysOrg | Deborah Netburn, LA Times | 2011 Aug 10

This week the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute announced that it had raised more than $200,000 from a crowd-sourced fundraising effort that launched earlier this spring. The money, which came from just over 2,000 people who want to keep the search for alien life alive, will help the institute put its Allen Telescope Array back online.

"We are so grateful to our donors," said Tom Pierson, who co-founded the SETI Institute with Jill Tarter (the inspiration for Jodie Foster's character in "Contact.") "We believe we will be back on the air in September."

On the Setistars.org website, where the call for donations was originally placed, large red type proclaims: "Thank You for Your Support to Resume the Search!"

The Allen Telescope Array, or ATA, is a series of 42 linked radio-telescope dishes funded by a $30 million gift from Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen. Built at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in a valley near Mount Shasta, Calif., it is the first group of radio telescopes built from the ground up with the intention of being used full time to monitor the universe for radio waves that would indicate there is life on planets beyond our own.

The ATA has been monitoring the universe consistently since 2008, but in April of this year, SETI and its partner, the Radio Astronomy Lab of the University of California, Berkeley, ran out of money and had to put the ATA into hibernation mode.

That's when SETI turned to earthlings via their Internet, to see if they could help raise money to put the array back online.

So far, 2,276 of them have responded and the institute met its fundraising goal with days to spare. (Pierson notes that the institute is happy to collect additional donations).

Of course, $200,000 isn't enough to fund a project of this scope, and Pierson said SETI is in negotiations with the U.S. Air Force to continue to collect information on orbital debris. By charging for that service, SETI may be able to earn enough money to keep listening for signs of life.

As to whether valuable time was lost in the four months that the ATA was offline, Pierson said it's hard to say. "You never know when or if a signal is going to be detected, so if you miss a few months, how important is that? It's impossible to know," he said. "We view this mission as one of profound importance, answering man's most fundamental questions - are we alone? Being off air is something we needed to fix."

(c) 2011, Los Angeles Times. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

[neufer]

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Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Jill Tarter steps down as director of SETI
By Marc Kaufman, Washington Post: Tuesday, May 22, 8:33 AM

<<For more than three decades, astronomer and extraterrestrial life visionary Jill Tarter has been the public face of the sometimes controversial, sometimes lauded search for signs of intelligent beings throughout the cosmos. A founding member in 1984 of the nonprofit Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research, Tarter has led the group’s expansion and evolution as the broader science of astrobiology has blossomed. To her great disappointment, she said last week, SETI has not detected the kind of compressed radio signals from afar that nature cannot create but intelligent beings can. Nonetheless, she said she is beyond delighted about how the search for life beyond Earth has become so much more sophisticated, more promising and more mainstream.

Yet Tarter and SETI announced Tuesday morning that its longtime director will step down from that post and turn her efforts to fundraising to keep the organization afloat. Tarter will hand over the director’s reins to Gerry Harp, an expert in quantum mechanics who has been an innovator in using the Northern California radio telescope array that SETI partially owns and has helped run. Why the move now?

“When we started SETI, we had two goals in mind,” Tarter said, “to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and to create a center where that search could continue into the future as our technologies, our understandings and our computing powers increased. “The search is more robust now than ever, but the center is struggling financially. It needs somebody to spend all their time raising funds so the Center for SETI Research itself can be around to understand that signal we are confident will be sent.”

Tarter, 68, was the obvious choice to lead the fundraising effort. Well-respected and honored in the scientific community, she is also known in popular culture as Ellie Arroway, a young woman obsessed with extraterrestrial life, played by actress Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie “Contact.”

Tarter has also long been involved in outreach programs such as SETI@home, which encourages computer owners to help process SETI data on their machines, and has been the principal investigator for two elementary, middle and high school curriculum projects on “Life in the Universe” and evolution funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation and others.

The immediacy of the financial threat became clear last year. SETI and the University of California at Berkeley jointly operated a sophisticated radio telescope array built with $30 million donated by Microsoft founder Paul Allen and others, primarily from Silicon Valley. The array went into operation in 2007 — a dream come true for those involved in the SETI effort.

But the 42-dish array, which sits on federal lands in Northern California, had to be put into hibernation for six months because of a lack of money. SETI has been short of the $3 million a year it needs to operate the center and the array. The shortfall was in large part caused by cuts in the California state university system and diminishing donations. The Allen Telescope Array resumed operations last year after sufficient donations came in and additional money flowed in from the Air Force, which funded a study into whether the array could be used as part of its system to track satellites and space debris in low-Earth orbit.

In April, the nonprofit group SRI International, which has three decades of experience in operating radio telescope facilities for the federal government and the National Science Foundation, took over management of the Allen Array. SRI has a contract with the Air Force to track space debris, an increasingly important task as essential and costly satellites are at greater risk of collision with the growing amount of orbiting space junk. Tarter said that SETI will be able to continue its operations at the array — at Hat Creek, between Mount Lassen and Mount Shasta — while the space debris tracking gears up.

Fascinated by the work of Frank Drake, a pioneer in the field, Tarter started her work on the search for extraterrestrial life in the mid-1970s. For some time she worked on a small NASA-sponsored program focused on that search.

The program was scheduled to expand in the early 1990s, but then-Sen. Richard H. Bryan (D-Nev.) effectively killed it, famously saying the federal government shouldn’t be spending money in the search for little green men and UFOs. (It wasn’t.) SETI wasn’t allowed to compete for federal funds from 1993 until the last years of the George W. Bush administration.

SETI’s work continued under the nonprofit SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. A primary focus now is to look for signals that might be coming from the stars with orbiting exoplanets that have been identified by NASA’s Kepler telescope.

The Kepler space observatory has already found more than 2,300 “candidate” planets, and its discoveries have led astronomers and planetary scientists to conclude that there are probably hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way alone. Tarter is a member of the science team working with the Kepler data streaming in. “Kepler has dramatically changed and improved how we do our SETI searches,” Tarter said. “Before we were pointing at stars that just might have planets and moons, and now we know they’re out there. Very exciting.”

She said she’s also encouraged by the growing international interest in SETI observation. Under the initiative of Japanese astronomer and observatory director Shin-ya Narusawa, a worldwide SETI effort to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Drake’s first efforts brought in 27 institutions from 15 nations.

The idea for the Northern California radio telescope array was born of SETI’s desire to have dedicated telescope time all its own, coupled with the pioneering work of William “Jack” Welch, former director of University of California at Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Laboratory and of the fledgling Hat Creek facility. That Tarter and Welch are married no doubt lent additional energy to the joint venture.

Tarter says she hopes her greater role in fundraising will allow the Allen Array to grow to its initially planned size, but more immediately to keep the Center for SETI Research up and running. “If during my career we don’t detect a signal, I’ll be disappointed, but still optimistic it will happen some day,” she said. “But if the SETI project withers and we don’t have a center to take advantage of the new discoveries that are sure to come . . . then I’ll consider my work very much unfinished.”>>

[orin stepanek]

SETI's new leader! http://www.seti.org/users/gharp