SETI Institute to shut down alien-seeking radio dishes

By Lisa M. Krieger

lkrieger@mercurynews.com

Posted: 04/25/2011 07:20:22 PM PDT
Updated: 04/26/2011 09:23:23 AM PDT

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

Lacking the money to pay its operating expenses, Mountain View's SETI Institute has pulled the plug on the renowned Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes that scan the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

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.

"There is a huge irony," said SETI Director Jill Tarter, "that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen."

SETI senior astronomer Seth 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," he added. "Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on
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their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company."

The SETI Institute's mission is to explore the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. This is a profound search, it believes, because it explains our place among the stars.

The program, located on U.S. Forest Service land near Mount Lassen, uses telescopes to listen for anything out of the ordinary -- a numerical sequence of "beeps," say, or crackly dialogue from an alien version of a disembodied "Charlie" talking to his "Angels." The entire program was set up to prove what once seemed unthinkable: In the universe, we are not alone.

Lack of funding

But funding for SETI has long been a headache for E.T.-seekers. NASA bankrolled some early projects, but in 1994, Sen. Richard Bryan of Nevada convinced Congress that it wasn't worth the cost, calling it the "Great Martian Chase" and complaining that not a single flying saucer had applied for FAA approval.

However, successful private funding came from donors such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, allowing SETI to raise $50 million to build the 42 dishes.

Plans called for construction of 350 individual radio antennas, all working

View Allen Telescope Array in a larger map
in concert. But what's lacking now is funding to support the day-to-day costs of running the dishes.

This is the responsibility of UC Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory, but one of the university's major funders, the National Science Foundation, supplied only one-tenth its previous support. Meanwhile, the state of California has also cut funding.

About $5 million is needed over the next two years, according to Tarter. She hopes the U.S. Air Force will help, because the array can be used to track satellite-threatening debris in space. But budgets are tight there as well.

Astronomers mourn

The Allen array is not the only radio telescope facility that can be used for SETI searches. But it is the best; elsewhere, scientists have to borrow time on other telescopes.

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.

Bay Area astronomers mourned the hiatus of the SETI program and expressed concern about the future.

Rob Hawley of the Peninsula Astronomical Society called it "unfortunate. The Allen scope was a wonderful experiment. "... Hubble gets all the press, but there are lots of limitations."

Amateur astronomer Sarah Wiehe of Palo Alto said, "just knowing SETI is there was significant for us. This is a setback."

"If we miss a distant signal," she added, "it would be a terrible loss."

"If we miss a distant signal," she added, "it would be a terrible loss."

On va écouter 86 planètes pour rechercher la vie extraterrestre
Par Rémy Decourt, Futura-Sciences

Malgré les difficultés financières rencontrées par Seti, l’écoute des extraterrestres se poursuit et, même, s’intensifie avec le début d’une campagne d’observation de quelque 86 exoplanètes, découvertes par le télescope Kepler de la Nasa et que l’on suppose évoluer dans la zone d’habitabilité de leur étoile.

Les difficultés financières rencontrées par Seti n’entament en rien la volonté de cet institut de recherche de débusquer une civilisation extraterrestre. Malgré l’arrêt du fonctionnement de l'Allen Telescope Array, de nombreux autres programmes d’observations se poursuivent et un nouveau vient de débuter.

Il a pour objectif d’écouter 86 planètes extrasolaires que l’on suppose favorables à la vie car évoluant dans la zone d'habitabilité de leur étoile, une notion très utile même si elle manque de précision, comme le rappellent les débats autour de l'habitabilité de l'exoplanète Gliese 581 d. Le terme désigne la région où l'eau peut rester liquide à la surface d'une planète et où les conditions physiques (température en particulier) sont susceptibles d'être compatibles avec l'existence de la vie, du moins sous la forme que nous lui connaissons.
L’objectif est évidemment d’entendre un signal caractéristique d’une émission intelligente. Même si les astronomes ne découvrent pas de civilisations extraterrestres, le retour scientifique sera néanmoins conséquent.



Une masse de données confiée aux internautes

Ces planètes n’ont évidemment pas été choisies au hasard. Elles font partie des 1.235 planètes découvertes par Kepler, dont une cinquantaine évolue dans la zone d’habitabilité de leur étoile. On suppose que ces 86 planètes sont dans cette zone. « Il n'est pas absolument certain que tous ces systèmes planétaires soient habitables, mais ce sont de très bons endroits pour chercher E.T. », a déclaré Andrew Siemion, étudiant de troisième cycle à l'Université de Californie à Berkeley.

Initiées par l’Université de Berkeley, ces observations vont se faire depuis le radiotélescope de Green Bank (100 mètres), en Virginie Occidentale (États-Unis). Le projet a commencé le 8 mai et doit durer un an. Lorsque les chercheurs auront obtenu 24 heures de données sur les 86 planètes, ils vont les analyser grossièrement et, deux mois plus tard, demander aux millions d’utilisateurs du Seti@home de procéder à une analyse plus fine.

Ce réseau, mis au point par Seti, utilise la puissance inutilisée de millions d’ordinateurs personnels, un peu partout dans le monde. L’idée est de se servir du temps de veille de chaque ordinateur du réseau pour traiter les données d’observations du radiotélescope d’Arecibo, le plus grand du monde (300 mètres).

If ET phones, we're listening again -- thanks to you.

Astronomers at the cash-strapped SETI Institute are poised to resume the quest for extraterrestrial life, after raising more than $200,000 to restart a key array of telescopes.

The institute was forced to put the hunt on hold in April, after cash-strapped governments decided they could no longer afford to pay the interstellar phone bill. To raise the required money, SETI turned to crowdsourcing: It unveiled the SETIStars.org website in June and independently raised the $204,129 needed to restart the Allen Telescope Array.

"Thank you to everyone who helped us reach our goal of getting the ATA back online!" reads a note posted to the SETI website. "Stay tuned for updates. We are discovering more Earth-like planets every day, so now is more critical than ever to look for extraterrestrial life."

In April, astronomers at the SETI Institute said a steep drop in state and federal funds has forced the shutdown of the Allen array, a powerful tool in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

"There's plenty of cosmic real estate that looks promising," Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the institute, said at the time. "We've lost the instrument that's best for zeroing in on these better targets."

The 42 radio dishes that make it up had scanned deep space since 2007 for signals from alien civilizations while also conducting research into the structure and origin of the universe. The $50 million array was built by SETI and UC Berkeley with the help of a $30 million donation from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

The quest for funding isn't over yet, however. Operating the dishes cost about $1.5 million a year, mostly to pay for the staff of eight to 10 researchers and technicians to operate the facility. An additional $1 million a year was needed to collect and sift the data from the dishes.

The Institute is looking for other source of money for the $2.5 million it requires annually to operate.

The SETI Institute was founded in 1984 and has received funding from NASA, the National Science Foundation and several other federal programs and private foundations. It uses other tools in the quest for alien life, such as a dish at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, the largest radio telescope in the world.

The difference, Shostak 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.

"It has the advantage that you can point it where you want to point it and you can keep pointing it in that direction for as long as we want it to," Shostak said.

The dishes also are unique in the ability to probe for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations while gathering more general scientific data.

"That made the telescope a double-barreled threat," said Leo Blitz, a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and former director of the observatory that includes the Allen Telescope Array.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.