SETI Searches Today.. Continued
META
Project META (Megachannel Extra-Terrestrial Assay)
has used a pair of 30-meter antennas near
Buenos Aires since 1990 to survey nearly half the sky repeatedly between
declination -90° and -10°. It has monitored 8.4 million very narrow,
0.05-hertz channels very close to the 21-centimeter line and its second
harmonic, at 1.42 and 2.84 GHz respectively. Its bandwidth has since been
widened.
Amateur Searches:
Project BAMBI. Short for, "Bob And Mikes' Big Investment", BAMBI is a pair of 3.1-million-channel radio telescopes that will observe in parallel from California and Colorado 1,000 miles apart to screen out local interference. Bob Lash, Mike Fremont, and Mike Fox will use their setup to explore frequencies near 4 GHz, higher than other searches.
Optical SETI. Searches today are not limited to microwave radio. Stuart Kingsley of Columbus, Ohio has long advocated laser technology as an attractive alternative to interstellar radio. His COSETI (Columbus Optical SETI) Observatory performed a pioneering targeted search of hundreds of stars - both for narrow-band laser signals and for extremely brief pulsed signals - at visible wavelengths using just a 10-inch amateur telescope and commercial equipment.
SETI@home
In late 1994 David Gedye, a Seattle computer scientist, had a brainstorm. He
realized that deeper analysis of SETI radio data would be a perfect project for
"distributed computing" by tens of thousands of volunteers using home
computers.
You download a 790-kilobyte program. It installs as your computer's default screen saver. It then fetches a 350-kilobyte file of data (a "work unit") recorded by the SERENDIP receiver. The program mulls over the data whenever your computer has nothing else to do. When the analysis is done (about 10 to 80 hours of processing time), your computer sends back the results and fetches another work unit the next time you connect to the Internet.
For information go to setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu.