Search For Alien Life On 86 Planets Begins 248
liqs8143 writes "Astronomers from the United States have begun searching for alien life on 86 possible earth-like planets. A massive radio telescope that listens for signs of alien life is being used for this project. These 86 planets are short-listed from 1235 possible planets detected by NASA's Kepler telescope. The mission is part of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, launched in the mid 1980s. A giant dish pointing towards each of the 86 planets will gather 24 hours of data, starting from this week."
Re:Accessible data? (Score:5, Informative)
Data from all NSF funded instruments are in the public domain after a 'suitable' period for the primary investigator who proposed the actual science with the instrument has had crack at it.
For the telescopes this tends to be 1 year from observing, after that the data is available to all. It sounds like the data from this project will wave that 1 year period and be available for SETI@home as soon as it's done.
Re:What exactly.. (Score:5, Informative)
Over the planet's transit over the face of the star, from our angle, the light interacts with the atmosphere of the planet before passing through to be seen by our telescopes. The light is broken down into component frequencies to determine the chemicals present and their relative concentrations in the atmosphere. Some chemical signatures can be understood as the the result of natural processes, while others do not seem to occur without the influence of biological processes. We are looking for 'unnatural atmospheres' modified by exotic processes that cannot be readily explained under natural conditions.
Telescope in West Virginia (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure why the author felt it was necessary to repeatedly reference 'a radio telescope in rural West Virginia' without giving an
actual link or reference to the GBT instead of yet another self referential physorg link.
The Green Bank Telescope GBT (http://www.gb.nrao.edu/) is a very impressive instrument just from an engineering stand point.
If you're even in the area it's well worth visiting though it is a bit off the beaten path.
With it's spectrometer (http://www.gb.nrao.edu/gbsapp/) it's also a good instrument for interstellar medium (ISM) biochemistry surveys. That may be a more fruitful area of study unless of course somebody does pick up the Ff99x22dddlw race's version of an Olympic broadcast.
News from Seti@Home (Score:4, Informative)
From the relevant thread [berkeley.edu] over at Seti@Home:
"Grad student Andrew Siemion reports that new modifications to a data recorder at Green Bank that we need for our Kepler SETI observations are now complete, thanks to a huge amount of help from Paul Demorest, a former grad student and one of initial authors of AstroPulse. Our first hour of test time is scheduled for this Saturday, 17:30 EDT. We'll be observing with 450 seconds per target on 90 Kepler field stars with interesting planet candidates (~habitable zone, ~Earth size, ~Earth period, ~several planets), then do a raster scan of the entire Kepler field. " - Eric Korpela
Re:Telescope in West Virginia (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they aren't using the GBT's spectrometer. They are using an instrument that I helped to develop for pulsar research called GUPPI, which uses FPGAs and GPUs to real-time process 800MHz of radio bandwidth.
However, in this case they are using GUPPI's GPU nodes to record 800MHz of Nyquist-sampled band centered at 1.5GHz. Each sample is 2-bits, and with 2 polarizations, that is how they get 800MB/s (or almost a GB/s as it says in the article).
If you want some basic info about GUPPI, you can find it here:
https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/CICADA/NGNPP [nrao.edu]
Re:crop circles (Score:4, Informative)
If this data (and I call it data, because it isn't useful enough to be called knowledge), were good for anything, then why doesn't the private industry seem interested in it[?] This type of research is just welfare for otherwise bright individuals who decided to get an ivory tower education so they could spend their lives on meaningless pursuits.
Because private industry isn't interested in "meaning", they're interested in profit. Oh, and "fixing the earth" is a political problem, not a resource problem.