14 DAY TRIAL // SETI is an acronym for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, the collective name for a number of organized efforts to detect Extraterrestrial life. The project aims to survey the sky to detect the existence of transmissions from a civilization on a distant planet.
The institute is planning to have 42 radio astronomy dishes functioning in northern California by the end of 2007, which will allow for continuous scanning of the skies for alien radio transmissions.
"There are a number of groups around the world doing SETI research. They are listening for radio signals out there, but it is not 24/7," said Scott Hubbard, who holds the Carl Sagan Chair for the Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
"But it tends to be borrowed time where scientists sign up to use a facility for a few days or a few weeks at a time," he told Reuters Friday on the sidelines of a space development conference in Dallas.
This is all about to change as the 42 radio dishes will be brought on line, when the search will be going on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
"When you put all these dishes together it makes a pretty large patch in the sky which you can listen to with great sensitivity - detecting signals which are either very far away or very faint," Hubbard said.
"You don't have to have somebody who is planning to broadcast a signal. You hope to pick up somebody's old radio broadcast that left a different planet hundreds or thousands of years ago," he said.
The SETI project became internationally famous in 1977, when Jerry Ehman, a project volunteer, witnessed an incredibly strong signal received by the array. He circled the indication on a printout and handwrote the phrase "Wow!" in the margin.
This signal, dubbed the Wow! signal, is considered by some to be the most likely candidate from an artificial, extraterrestrial source ever discovered, but it has not been detected again in several additional searches.