Return to the Ashes
by H. Paul Shuch, Ph.D.
Executive Director
When launched a year prior, the two-pronged NASA SETI study which Congress cancelled in 1993 had been slated to run ten years. Thus, it seemed a miracle of rebirth when California's SETI Institute lauched its ambitious privatized search in 1994. Aptly dubbed Project Phoenix because it rose from the ashes of NASA SETI's demise, this targeted search continued for a decade, surveying all the sunlike stars within two hundred light years of Earth, from six great radio telescopes in Parkes and Mopra, Australia, Green Bank WV, Woodbury GA, Arecibo in Puerto Rico, and Jodrell Bank in the UK. Now that Project Phoenix has completed surveying the thousand nearest good suns (some would say better than NASA could have done the job), where does SETI go from here?
Not ones to rest on their laurels, the engineers and scientists at the SETI Institute are now directing their resources toward the design and construction of the world's most sensitive SETI instrument, the Allen Telescope Array. When it's completed, our California colleagues will no longer have to raise and spend millions renting time on big dishes around the world. In fact, researchers from numerous countries are already queueing up to rent telescope time from them! A few years' observational hiatus is a small price to pay for the birthing of so grand an instrument.
...
Does this mean that SETI observations are now at a standstill? Hardly! For there's still that other prong of the old NASA SETI plan, the all-sky survey. This is where The SETI League came in nine years ago, with our Project Argus global search. And we're just hitting our stride.
get the Full Story at SETILeague
Sir Ulli
by H. Paul Shuch, Ph.D.
Executive Director
When launched a year prior, the two-pronged NASA SETI study which Congress cancelled in 1993 had been slated to run ten years. Thus, it seemed a miracle of rebirth when California's SETI Institute lauched its ambitious privatized search in 1994. Aptly dubbed Project Phoenix because it rose from the ashes of NASA SETI's demise, this targeted search continued for a decade, surveying all the sunlike stars within two hundred light years of Earth, from six great radio telescopes in Parkes and Mopra, Australia, Green Bank WV, Woodbury GA, Arecibo in Puerto Rico, and Jodrell Bank in the UK. Now that Project Phoenix has completed surveying the thousand nearest good suns (some would say better than NASA could have done the job), where does SETI go from here?
Not ones to rest on their laurels, the engineers and scientists at the SETI Institute are now directing their resources toward the design and construction of the world's most sensitive SETI instrument, the Allen Telescope Array. When it's completed, our California colleagues will no longer have to raise and spend millions renting time on big dishes around the world. In fact, researchers from numerous countries are already queueing up to rent telescope time from them! A few years' observational hiatus is a small price to pay for the birthing of so grand an instrument.
...
Does this mean that SETI observations are now at a standstill? Hardly! For there's still that other prong of the old NASA SETI plan, the all-sky survey. This is where The SETI League came in nine years ago, with our Project Argus global search. And we're just hitting our stride.
get the Full Story at SETILeague
Sir Ulli
