NASA recruits its SETI team.NASA NASA: see National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA in full National Aeronautics and Space Administration Independent U.S. recruits its SETI SETI (sĕt`ē) [Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence], name given to a series of independent programs to detect radio signals from civilizations beyond the solar system. team On Jan. 15, NASA named nine scientists to work on its Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Microwave Observing Project. Using radiotelescopes, this team will listen for attempts to communicate with Earth by life elsewhere in the galaxy (SN: 5/13/89, p.296). Jill C. Tarter of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., will direct the team, which plans to begin listening for the extraterrestrial broadcasts on Oct. 12, 1992, the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landing in the Americas. SETI researchers at Ames will focus their attention on microwave emissions from about 1,000 selected stellar sources -- stars similar to the sun and within 80 light-years of Earth. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory “JPL” redirects here. For other uses, see JPL (disambiguation). Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a NASA research center located in the cities of Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge, near Los Angeles, California, USA. in Pasadena, Calif., a second SETI team will manage a broader survey of the whole sky "to detect signals from directions that might be overlooked if the search were limited to nearby [sun-like] stars." Some project scientists will labor before the listening begins: * Peter B. Boyce in Washington, D.C., executive officer of the American Astronomical Society The American Astronomical Society (AAS, sometimes pronounced "double-A-S") is a US society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC. , will try to identify stars within about 13 light-years that may have been in the beams of Earthbased radars used to study lunar and planetary surfaces -- in case such signals motivated any life forms on planets near such stars to attempt a reply. * Several SETI team members, including Michael M. Davis Michael M. Davis (1879 - 1971) was the Executive Chair of the Committee for the Nation's Health. Throughout his life he was a major figure in health care policy. During Harry S. Truman's time as President, Michael Davis kept files and records of Truman's speeches. , director of the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico Puerto Rico (pwār`tō rē`kō), island (2005 est. pop. 3,917,000), 3,508 sq mi (9,086 sq km), West Indies, c.1,000 mi (1,610 km) SE of Miami, Fla. , will work on configuring the project's radio receivers to automatically weed out spurious signals from Earth or nearby, including those from artificial satellites. * Kenneth C. Turner, program director for extragalactic astronomy at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., hopes to tailor the project's computer software to ignore Earth-based signals that reflect back from the moon or other bodies in the solar system. * David W. Latham of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) is a "research institute" of the Smithsonian Institution headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it is joined with the Harvard College Observatory (HCO) to form the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). in Cambridge, Mass., will reevaluate the existing list of stars selected for detailed observations using a database of more modern observations. |
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