National Radio Astronomy Observatory - Image: Education Images/UIG via Getty Images

The history of SETI@Home

Engadget recently posted a very interesting article about the SETI@Home project, one of the projects available on the Gridcoin Research list for rewards.

They write about Frank D. Drake who, in the 1960s, pointed the 26-meter telescope of NRAO (National Radio Astronomy Observatory) towards the skies. Looking for radiosignals from outer space. He named his project "Project Ozma" back then.

4 moths and 150 hours of tape with noise

The project was going on for 4 months and recorded 150 hours of tape with radio noise. Even tough nothing significant came out of these tapes, he was a pioneer on the field of science for search of any extraterrestrial intelligence.

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope - Image: John B. Carnett via Getty Images

SETI Institute of California

Today, 33 years after the start, the project employs 120 people in its staff, 75 researchers with a PhD-level. They do research in a various branch where SETI is just one of these. The other fields are astronomy and astrophysics, geoscience, exobiology, exoplanets and exploration.

For radio observations the SETI project today utilizes a 42-dish setup located at Hat Creek Radio Observatory. With a staggering 55 terabytes of data generated every day(!!) the project has much to go trough.

They also do optical surveys of the sky with the help of the UC Berkeley's Lick Observatory and the Harvard Haystack telescope.

SETI@Home and modern day issues

The program currently only has around 150,000 volunteers (down from a peak of 1.5 million users) and "we're getting back into our problem again in that the telescope can generate far more data than we can analyze with the best sensitivity," said Dr. Eric Korpela, head of the SETI@Home project.

The projects volunteers only account for around 2% of the Breakthrough Listen Initiative's analytical power, even tough they have millions of CPUs working trough their data. The fact that many people now days stop using desktops and goes more mobile does not help either.

"But given that there are a couple billion Android devices out there," Korpela mused, "there are another 200 petaFLOP/s out there that we haven't tapped yet." The SETI@Home team hopes to garner new interest in their efforts when they release their report from the Breakthrough Listen Initiative this fall.

Still expanding their search

Even tough they are having big plans to expand their data collecting efforts. With an expansion of the Allen Array from 42 to at least 128 in the near future and then grow to more than 300 dishes! They will also do upgrades on antennas to increase the sensitivity to the radio feeds, as well as upgrading the back from todays 3-beam to 12-beam, enabling them to sample larger parts of the sky.

Read the full article on Engadget

The article has some very interesting historical details and well worth a read if your interested in this field of science.

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