Saturday, 22 March 2003

Now, after years of searching, gathering, and analyzing, SETI@home is preparing to revisit its most promising signals. For eight hours each day, on March 18th through the 20th, Dan Wethimer and his team will have full use of the Arecibo radio telescope. They will use the time to target between 100 and 200 locations in the sky where the strongest, clearest, and most promising candidate signals had been detected by SETI@home. Only a candidate signal that has been revisited and confirmed in this manner can be considered a potential intelligent transmission from the stars. March 19: from the Seti team: SETI@home's plans to reobserve its most promising candidate signals were interrupted today by the unexpected intervention of a Solar flare. Instead of eight full hours of observations on Wednesday, the SETI@home team had to settle for a short two-hour window from 4pm-6pm Atlantic Standard Time. For the next few days, beginning Wednesday, March 20, and ending Sunday, March 23, the Arecibo radio telescope will be used as a giant radar, sending out electromagnetic bursts that will bounce off the Earth's upper atmosphere. The radar observations will begin before the arrival of the Solar radiation and continue during the Solar storm. [Photo courtesy of the NAIC - Arecibo Observatory, a facility of the NSF] 10:05:03 AM

© Copyright 2004 Bill. Last update: 18/3/04; 5:36:10 AM.