Answers to Scavenger Hunt Questions

  1. Parkes 210 foot radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia.
  2. Seth Shostak
  3. Senator William Proxmire, in 1981, chopped funding; NASA eventually moved back into SETI, notably with the the High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS). In 1993, Nevada Senator Richard Bryan successfully introduced an amendment that eliminated all funding for the NASA SETI program. 
  4. Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations.   SERENDIP IV is a supercomputer that consists of forty spectrum analyzer boards that examine168 million channels every 1.7 seconds in a 100 MHz band centered at 1.42 GHz. The SERENDIP instrument stores signals that peak significantly above the background noise.
  5. The Allen Telescope Array was named for Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, who put up $11.5 million for the project.
  6. Independence Day.
  7. Frank Drake's Project Ozma listened for signals from space using the radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia.
  8. Drs. Philip Morrison and Guiseppe Coconni publish in Nature magazine the first modern SETI article, "Searching for Interstellar Communication," which indicated, in 1959, the potential of using microwave radio for extraterrestrial communication.
  9. Site A is in California, and Site B is in Colorado.
  10. The Arecibo message was sent toward M13, a star cluster some 25,000 light-years away, which means that it will take  25,000 years to get there. However, the signal will pass near some 30 stars along the way.
  11. McMinnville, Oregon
  12. John Glenn
  13. Groom Lake, near Las Vegas, Nevada
  14. It is a targeted SETI search, focusing only on nearby systems.
  15. It is a one hectare array of inexpensive radio telescopes.
  16. He writes about where the ETs are likely to be "hanging out," and where we might expect to contact them.
  17. The heroine of the movie finds extra-terrestrial radio signals in the same ways that a typical targeted search works.
  18. Feb. 22-27, 1999 at Silver Lake in California's Mojave Desert
  19. Allen Telescope Array
  20. 48,000 years (from the ultimate destination)
  21. The "WOW" signal.
  22. Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort
  23. It is a form of Supernova.
  24. The Large Magellanic Cloud is 50 kilo parsecs away.
  25. The Mega-Channel Extraterrestrial Assay
  26. Australia; The Great Barrier Reef, July 8-12, 2002.
  27. Instead of listening for radio signals, this new project searches for pulses of light from thousands of nearby stars. 
  28. Carl Sagan.
  29. 0.5 to 60 gigahertz=20
  30. Project Argus is an effort to deploy and coordinate roughly 5,000 small radio telescopes around the world, in an all-sky survey for microwave signals of possible intelligent extra-terrestrial origin.
  31. In the early 1970's NASA's Ames Research Centre commissioned a panel of outside experts to produce a comprehensive study of the technology that would be required to carry out an effective search.
  32. By May 2000, 2 million participants had downloaded the software, making SETI@home the world's most powerful supercomputer. 
  33. +1(201) 641-1771
  34. A little program created to "spy" on (or pay attention to) the progress and performance of the SETI@home client.
  35. Evolutionary developmental biology, also known as "evo-devo," studies the genes that control embryonic development in different organisms to answer questions about evolution.
  36. Sagan and Mayr debated whether humans were unique in the universe, or if extra-terrestrial life could exist.  Dr. Mayr took the point of view that uniqueness characterized human intelligence, while Dr. Sagan focused on the belief that intelligent life could and did exist elsewhere in the universe.
  37. Tom Pierson.
  38. With support from NASA and The Planetary Society, Paul Horowitz spent a year as an NRC postdoctoral fellow at Ames Research Center (1981-82), where he and colleagues from Stanford University and NASA built a high-resolution hardware spectrometer that could handle in real time the kind of signal processing that was used in the earlier Arecibo search. 
  39. http://seti.uws.edu.au/main/messages.htm
  40. Schwartz & Townes
  41. SETI@home offers a newsletter.
  42. N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L
  43. The radio signals are in a form of narrow-band signal.  They are known to be a few Hertz or less wide and pack a lot of energy into a small amount of spectral space.
  44. A radio telescope collects radio waves in its parabolic dish and concentrates them in a focal point where a receiver is placed.
  45. There are several advantages:  (1) Several stars can be examined simultaneously, rather than looking at one star at a time.  (2) More "pixels" can be generated on the sky at once. (3) Easy to expand an array by merely buying additional antennas and connecting them into the system.
  46. Weak signal communication is a form of communication where radio signals have signal strength levels that are close to or partially embedded in the natural noise.  It is believed that SETI signals are likely to be detected as weak signal communication.
  47. Because the stars that scientists are focusing their search around are too far away for any of our rockets to reach. It would take 60,000 years for one of our rockets to reach Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to us.
  48. Project Phoenix
  49. A stable orbit, an atmosphere, liquid water, and a climate regulated by plate tectonics.
  50. Approximately one per year. 
  51. Projects Argus, Beta and Phoenix,  SETI@home, and Southern SERENDIPITY.
  52. $20.  
  53. Earth-Moon-Earth communications.
  54. Mike Fox and Mike Fremont.
  55. Jodrell Bank Observatory.
  56. The Ohio State Radiotelescope is larger than three football fields in size, and it is equivalent in sensitivity to a circular dish 175 feet in diameter.
  57. International Radiotelescope-Array for the Search of Extrasolar Bursts.
  58. SETI@Home has had 1,703,487 users in the United States.
  59. Venus.
  60. Dr. Stuart A. Kingsley