SETI Allen Telescope Array detects no Radio Signals from Kepler planet 116454b

Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

A newly discovered planet has been observed with the Allen Telescope Array in a search for radio signals that may betray technically sophisticated inhabitants, but no transmissions have been detected.

The planet is known as Kepler 116454b, and orbits an orange dwarf star in the constellation Pisces. It is 180 light-years away.

Jon Richards, of the SETI Institute's Center for SETI Research, used the Allen Telescope Array to look for signals over the frequency range of 1000 – 2250 MHz.

In May, 2013 the Kepler space telescope suffered a mechanical failure that ended its ability to accurately aim at the sky, but the telescope has resumed its search for planets in a new mode, using the pressure of sunlight to help it steady its gaze on the sky.

Kepler 116454b is the first planet to be found by the reincarnated telescope, and its discovery was announced just before Christmas.

The planet orbits its home star in 9 days in an orbit three times smaller than Mercury's orbit around the Sun.

Consequently, temperatures on this world, which is a so-called "super Earth" and larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, are expected to be too hot for life as we know it.

Nonetheless, and as centuries of experience have shown, observation sometimes trumps expectation, and that is why new exoplanets, whether they seem promising for life or not, are routinely observed by the SETI Institute with the Allen Telescope Array.

The observations of Kepler 116454b will continue at higher frequencies, Richards notes.

Mysterious signal detected in galaxy 240 million light years away

Astronomers have detected a mysterious signal 240 million light years away from Earth. The unidentified signal is a 'spike of intensity at a very specific wavelength of x-ray light', but scientists don't yet know what the origin is.

Picked up in the Perseus Cluster, one of the biggest objects in the universe, the discovery is said to be the best evidence of dark matter yet.

Astronomers believe dark matter constitutes 85 per cent of the matter in the universe, but doesn't emit or absorb light like normal matter such as protons or electrons, which are known to make up the familiar elements seen in planets, stars, and galaxies.

Researchers suggest intensity coming from the Perseus Cluster could be a signature from the decay of a 'sterile neutrino,' which are a hypothetical type of neutrino thought to interact with normal matter via gravity but while holding exciting potential, the results must be confirmed with additional data to rule out other explanations and to see whether it is plausible that dark matter has been observed.

Arecibo observatory: Two New Programs Launching to Listen for Aliens

The 305-meter telescope at Arecibo Observatory is just one of a collection that SETI will use to search nearby stars for electronic signals that could indicate intelligent life. 

If such a civilization was utilizing a similar dish to image exoplanets, SETI's team should be able to detect it.

Credit: Arecibo Observatory

SETI is stepping up its search for alien lifeforms on far off worlds.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program recently announced two new methods to search for signals that could come from life on other planets.

In the Panchromatic SETI project, multiple telescopes will scan a variety of wavelengths from 30 stars near the sun; the project will look for powerful signals beamed into space, potentially by intelligent extraterrestrials.

SETI is also launching an interplanetary eavesdropping program that is expected to search for messages beamed between planets in a single system.

"If we are polluting space, perhaps other extraterrestrials are leaking signals," Dan Werthimer, director of the Berkley SETI Research Center, told an audience during the Smithsonian Magazine's "The Future is Here" Festival in May. "Maybe they're sending something our way."

'Everything we've got'
Since humans made their first FM radio and television transmissions, signals from Earth have been spilling out into space, announcing the presence of intelligent life to any group that might be searching for it.

According to Werthimer, signals from the 1950s television show "I Love Lucy" have reached thousands of stars, while the nearest suns have already enjoyed the "The Simpsons."

If Earth has unintentionally leaked signs of its presence, other alien civilizations may have done the same thing.

SETI's new Panchromatic project will utilize a variety of telescopes covering a range of frequencies to scour the nearest stars.

"We're going to throw everything we've got at it," Werthimer added.

The panchromatic project will examine a sample of the 30 stars that lie within 5 parsecs (16 light-years) from the sun. The list includes 13 single stars, seven binary systems and one triple system.

Most of the stars are smaller than the sun, but the project will also examine two white dwarfs and one moderately evolved F star. No confirmed exoplanets have been found around any of the stars.

By setting distance as the criteria, the SETI team hopes to alleviate any bias that might otherwise result from focusing on systems similar to that of Earth. The team selected stars for study based only on how far they lie from the sun.

According to SETI-Berkeley's Andrew Siemion, chief scientist of the eavesdropping project, the search will also probe a diverse stellar population already well studied at many wavelengths.

"In the event of a non-detection, these attributes of the sample will allow us to place strong and broadly applicable limits on the presence of technology," Siemion told Space.com via email.

Observations from the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope in Europe and the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia will begin over the summer and fall of 2014.

Instrument development and commissioning is still in progress for the Infrared Spatial Interferometer (ISI) at Mount Wilson Observatory and the Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory, both in California.

But according to Siemion, the pair should be ready at about the same time. The Nickel Telescope will conduct the first-ever SETI observations done in the near-infrared.

SETI HEKTOR: Distant asteroid, a complex mini geological world

Artistic representation of the Trojan system showing the large 250 km dual shape Hektor and its 12 km moon. 

Credit: H. Marchis & F. Marchis

After 8 years of observations, scientists from the SETI Institute have found an exotic orbit for the largest Trojan asteroid, (624) Hektor, the only one known to possess a moon.

The formation of this system made of a dual primary and a small moon is still a mystery, but they found the asteroid could be a captured Kuiper body product of the reshuffling of giant planets in our solar system.

The results are being published today in Astrophysical Letters.

This study, based on W. M. Keck Observatory data and photometric observations from telescopes throughout the world, suggests that the asteroid and its moon are products of the collision of two icy asteroids.

This work sheds light on the complex youth of our solar system, when the building blocks that formed the core of Giant planets and their satellites were tossed around or captured during the giant planet migrations.

Franck Marchis

In 2006, a small team of astronomers led by Franck Marchis, astronomer at the Carl Sagan center of the SETI Institute, detected the presence of a small 12 km diameter moon around the large Trojan asteroid (624) Hektor using the 10 m Keck II telescope atop Mauna Kea, fitted with the NIRC-2 (Near-Infrared Camera 2) instrument behind the adaptive optics and laser guide star system (LGS-AO).

Since then, they collaborated with several researchers from University of California at Berkeley to determine the orbit of this moon and understand the origin of the system.

Trojan asteroids are those that are temporarily trapped in regions 60 degrees in front or 60 degrees behind the planet Jupiter in its orbit around the Sun. They are difficult to study since they are small and faint.

While the asteroid has been studied for 8 years, there were a couple of significant challenges before a paper could be published, according to Marchis.

"The major one was technical: the satellite can be seen only with a telescope like Keck Observatory's fitted with LSG-AO, but time on the mighty Keck's is highly prized and in limited availability," he said.

"Secondly, the orbit of the satellite is so bizarre that we had to develop a complex new algorithm to be able to pin it down and understand its stability over time."

The research, conducted with expert assistance from colleagues at the Institut de Mécanique Céleste et de Calcul des Éphémérides (IMCCE) of the Observatoire de Paris, revealed that the 12 km moon orbits the large 250 km asteroid every 3 days at a distance of 600 km in an ellipse inclined almost 45 degrees with respect to the asteroid's equator.

More Information: "The puzzling mutual orbit of the binary Trojan asteroid (624) Hektor" published today by ApJL is co-authored by F. Marchis (SETI Institute), J. Durech (Charles University), J. Castillo-Rogez (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), F. Vachier (IMCCE-Obs. De Paris), M. Cuk (SETI Institute), J. Berthier (IMCCE-Obs. De Paris), M.H. Wong (UC Berkeley), P. Kalas (UC Berkeley), G. Duchene (UC Berkeley), M. A. van Dam (Flat Wavefronts), H. Hamanowa (Hamanowa observatory)and M. Viikinkoski (Tampere University) arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1402/1402.7336.pdf

SETI Prediction: Intelligent Alien Life Could Be Found by 2040

This exoplanet orbits the star Gliese 667 C, which belongs to a triple system. 

The six Earth-mass exoplanet circulates around its low-mass host star at a distance equal to only 1/20th of the Earth-Sun distance. 

The host star is a companion to two other low-mass stars, which are seen here in the distance. 

Credit: ESO

The first detection of intelligent extraterrestrial life will likely come within the next quarter-century, a prominent alien hunter predicts.

By 2040 or so, astronomers will have scanned enough star systems to give themselves a great shot of discovering alien-produced electromagnetic signals, said Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

"I think we'll find E.T. within two dozen years using these sorts of experiments," Shostak said here Thursday (Feb. 6) during a talk at the 2014 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) symposium at Stanford University.

"Instead of looking at a few thousand star systems, which is the tally so far, we will have looked at maybe a million star systems" 24 years from now, Shostak said. "A million might be the right number to find something."



Many potentially habitable worlds
Shostak's optimism is based partly on observations by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which has shown that the Milky Way galaxy likely teems with worlds capable of supporting life as we know it.

"The bottom line is, like one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up," Shostak said. "That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds."

Shostak and his colleagues think at least some of these worlds host intelligent aliens — beings that have developed the capability to send electromagnetic signals out into the cosmos, as human civilization does every second of every day.

So they're pointing big radio dishes toward the heavens, hoping to detect something produced by living beings.

Hubble images reveal Neptune's 'lost' inner moon

Naiad is the encircled point of light just to the left of Neptune.

Neptune's tiny, innermost moon, Naiad, has now been seen for the first time since it was discovered by Voyager's cameras in 1989.

Dr. Mark Showalter, a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, announced the result today in Denver, Colorado, at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society.

He and collaborators Dr. Jack Lissauer of the NASA Ames Research Center, Dr. Imke de Pater of UC Berkeley, and Robert French of the SETI Institute, also released a dramatic new image of Neptune's puzzling rings and ring-arcs, which were first imaged by Voyager.

Mark Showalter

"Naiad has been an elusive target ever since Voyager left the Neptune system," said Dr. Showalter. From Earth, Neptune is 2 million times brighter than Naiad, andthetwo are separated by only one arcsecond.

"This is equivalent to the width of a human hair from 50 feet away," noted collaborator Lissauer. The team of astronomers needed to develop new techniques to suppress Neptune's glare.

Naiad was finally revealed, moving across a sequence of eight images taken during December 2004.

Strangely, Naiad appears to have veered significantly off course. The astronomers are puzzled by the fact that Naiad is now far ahead of its predicted orbital position.

They wonder whether gravitational interactions with one of Neptune's other moons may have caused it to speed up, although the details remain mysterious.

Further observations will be needed in order to understand Naiad's motion.

In addition to its moons, Neptune hosts a family faint rings and ring-arcs. The arcs have been changing slowly in the years since their discovery.

Whereas Voyager saw a set of four closely-spaced arcs, the leading two arcs have been fading away, and are completely absent from the newest images.

The trailing arcs, however, are essentially unchanged. This system of arcs is probably confined by the gravitational effects of the nearby moon Galatea, but the reason for the long-term changes is unknown.

Dr. de Pater has also been following the ongoing evolution of the arcs from the 10-meter W. M. Keck telescope in Hawaii.

Hubble Astronomers find new Neptune moon

This composite Hubble Space Telescope picture shows the location of a newly discovered moon, designated S/2004 N 1, orbiting Neptune. 

The black and white image was taken in 2009 with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in visible light. 

Hubble took the colour inset of Neptune on August 2009. 

Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Showalter/SETI Institute

NASA and ESA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a new moon orbiting the distant blue-green planet Neptune, the 14th known to be circling the giant planet.

The moon, designated S/2004 N 1, is estimated to be no more than 12 miles across, making it the smallest known moon in the Neptunian system.

It is so small and dim that it is roughly 100 million times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye.

It even escaped detection by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew past Neptune in 1989 and surveyed the planet's system of moons and rings.

Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., found the moon July 1, while studying the faint arcs, or segments of rings, around Neptune.

"The moons and arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system," he said.

"It's the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete—the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs."

The method involved tracking the movement of a white dot that appears over and over again in more than 150 archival Neptune photographs taken by Hubble from 2004 to 2009.

This diagram shows the orbits of several moons located close to the planet Neptune. 

All of them were discovered in 1989 by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, with the exception of S/2004 N 1, which was discovered in archival Hubble Space Telescope images taken from 2004 to 2009.

The moons all follow prograde orbits and are nestled among Neptune's rings (not shown). 

The outer moon Triton was discovered in 1846 — the same year the planet itself was discovered. 

Triton's orbit is retrograde, suggesting it is a captured Kuiper Belt object and therefore a distant cousin of Pluto. 

The inner moons may have formed after Triton's capture several billion years ago. 

Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

On a whim, Showalter looked far beyond the ring segments and noticed the white dot about 65,400 miles from Neptune, located between the orbits of the Neptunian moons Larissa and Proteus.

The dot is S/2004 N 1. Showalter plotted a circular orbit for the moon, which completes one revolution around Neptune every 23 hours.

UK astronomers to co-ordinate their search for alien signals

British scientists are to make a concerted effort to look for alien life among the stars.

Academics from 11 institutions have set up a network to co-ordinate their Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (Seti).

The English Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, will act as patron.

The group is asking funding agencies for a small - about £1m a year - sum of money to support listening time on radio telescopes and for data analysis.

It would also help pay for research that considered new ways to try to find aliens.

Currently, most Seti work is done in the US and is funded largely through private donation.

UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) co-ordinator Alan Penny said there was important expertise in Britain keen to play its part.

"If we had one part in 200 - half a percent of the money that goes into astronomy at the moment - we could make an amazing difference. We would become comparable with the American effort," the University of St Andrews researcher told BBC News.

"I don't know whether [aliens] are out there, but I'm desperate to find out. It's quite possible that we're alone in the Universe. And think about the implications of that: if we're alone in the Universe then the whole purpose in the Universe is in us. If we're not alone, that's interesting in a very different way."

The UKSRN held its first get-together at this week's National Astronomy Meeting.

British researchers and facilities have had occasional involvement in Seti projects down the years.

The most significant was the use in 1998-2003 of Jodrell bank, and its 76m Lovell radio telescope, in Project Phoenix. This was a search for signals from about 1,000 nearby stars. Organised - and paid for - by the Seti Institute in California, it ultimately found nothing.

Jodrell has since been updated, linking it via fibre optics into a 217km-long array with six other telescopes across England. Known as eMerlin, this system would be a far more powerful tool to scan the skies for alien transmissions.

And Jodrell's Tim O'Brien said Seti work could be done quite easily without disturbing mainstream science on the array.

"You could do serendipitous searches. So if the telescopes were studying quasars, for example, we could piggy-back off that and analyse the data to look for a different type of signal - not the natural astrophysical signal that the quasar astronomer was interested in, but something in the noise that one might imagine could be associated with aliens. This approach would get you Seti research almost for free," the Jodrell associate director explained.

"There are billions of planets out there. It would be remiss of us not to at least have half an ear open to any signals that might be being sent to us."

2 Pluto Moons Get New Names: Styx & Kerberus

The International Astronomical Union has officially approved Kerberos and Styx as the new names for two of Pluto's moons. Image released on July 2, 2013.

CREDIT: IAU

It's official! Two tiny moons orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto finally have new names: Styx and Kerberos.

The International Astronomical Union — the organization responsible for naming celestial objects — has approved "Kerberos" and "Styx" as the new monikers for two of Pluto's moons that were previously called P4 and P5 respectively, but fans of TV's "Star Trek" might not be too happy about the new names.

The IAU selected the names based on the results of the Pluto Rocks Internet poll sponsored by SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), but the top vote-getter, Vulcan, ultimately wasn't chosen as a name for one of the tiny moons.

Actor William Shatner — who portrayed the Starship Enterprise captain James T. Kirk in the original "Star Trek" TV series — suggested Vulcan (the home planet of the show's pointy-eared Vulcan people) as a possible candidate, and voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots in favour of it.

In total, nearly 500,000 votes were cast, with about 170,000 of those going to Vulcan alone. In second place was Cerberus with Styx coming in third in the online poll. But for Vulcan, it was not meant to be.

"The IAU gave serious consideration to this name, which happens to be shared by the Roman god of volcanoes," SETI officials wrote in a statement.

"However, because that name has already been used in astronomy, and because the Roman god is not closely associated with Pluto, this proposal was rejected."

IAU rules states that Pluto's moons should be named for mythological characters of the underworld in Greek and Roman mythology. Pluto is known as the ruler of the underworld in ancient mythos.

Cerberus, the three-headed dog in Roman mythology, came in a clear second in the Pluto Rocks ballot with nearly 100,000 votes, but IAU officials decided to tweak the name slightly, instead opting to name the moon Kerberos — Cerberus' equivalent in Greek myth.

The name Styx, the river that separates the living from the dead in ancient myth, garnered about 88,000 votes for a third place finish.

NASA TESS: Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite spacecraft to identify Exoplanets

An artist rendering of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft, to be launched in 2017. 

The TESS mission's primary goal would be to identify terrestrial planets orbiting nearby stars. 

NASA's Astrophysics Explorer Program has selected the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Mission to fly in 2017.

TESS will follow in the footsteps of NASA's pioneering Kepler Mission, continuing the groundbreaking work of discovering Earth-size exoplanets.

NASA selected TESS and another explorer mission after a competition that evaluated proposals for the best scientific value and most feasible development plans.

TESS will use an array of four telescopes to perform an all-sky survey to discover transiting exoplanets of all sizes in orbit around the nearest and brightest stars in the sky.

Its goal is to identify terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars that are best suited for extensive follow up observations and characterization.

TESS will collect 10 times as much data during its two-year mission as Kepler did during its first two years.

Jon M. Jenkins

SETI Institute scientist Jon M. Jenkins, co-investigator for data processing for both TESS and Kepler, will lead the development, design and operations of the TESS Data Processing Group (DPG) at NASA Ames Research Center.

The DPG will process the raw pixel data downlinked by TESS to detect the minuscule signatures of transiting exoplanets.

The DPG team will leverage the experience of the Science Operations Center of the Kepler Mission to develop a data processing facility that meets the rigorous requirements of the TESS mission at a low cost.

"It's extremely exciting to learn that the profound voyage of discovery that Kepler began in 2009 will continue with a mission to discover Earth's closest cousins," said Jon Jenkins.

Most exoplanets discovered by Kepler are hundreds of lights years from Earth.

Large, Fast and Rare Meteorite hits the Earth

Geology professor Qing-zhu Yin holds a fragment of the Sutter Mill meteorite that exploded over the Sierra foothills this past spring. (Gregory Urquiaga/UC Davis photo).

A meteorite that exploded as a fireball over California's Sierra foothills this past spring was among the fastest, rarest meteorites known to have hit the Earth, and it traveled a highly eccentric orbital route to get here.

An international team of scientists presents these and other findings in a study published Friday, Dec. 21, in the journal Science.

The 70-member team included nine researchers from UC Davis, along with scientists from the SETI Institute, NASA and other institutions.

The researchers found that the meteorite that fell over Northern California on April 22 was the rarest type known to have hit the Earth - a carbonaceous chondrite. It is composed of cosmic dust and presolar materials that helped form the planets of the solar system.

The scientists learned that the meteorite formed about 4.5 billion years ago was knocked off its parent body, which may have been an asteroid or a Jupiter-family comet, roughly 50,000 years ago.

Once it left the comet, it began its journey to Earth and exploded over Sutter's Mill, the gold discovery site that sparked the California Gold Rush.

As it flew toward Earth, it traveled an eccentric course through the solar system, flying from an orbit close to Jupiter toward the sun, passing by Mercury and Venus, and then flying out to hit Earth.

The high-speed, minivan-sized meteorite entered the atmosphere at about 64,000 miles per hour.

The study said it was the fastest, "most energetic" reported meteorite that's fallen since 2008, when an asteroid fell over Sudan.

"If this were a much bigger object and had landed in a more populated area, then this could have been a disaster," said co-author and UC Davis geology professor Qing-zhu Yin. "But, in this case, it is a happy."

Before entering Earth's atmosphere, the meteorite is estimated to have weighed roughly 100,000 pounds but most of that mass burned away when the meteorite exploded. Scientists and private collectors have recovered about 2 pounds remaining.

"Mars Belongs to the Martians" - Carl Sagan on Exploitation

There are so many examples of human misuse of the Earth that even phrasing this question chills me. If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes. The existence of an independent biology on a nearby planet is a treasure beyond assessing, and the preservation of that life must, I think, supersede any other possible use of Mars.

Carl Sagan’s gentle warning to future Mars explorers

SETI and Three Piatcions: As Seen Through a Telescope

This is an interesting music video for Italian shoegaze band “Thee Piatcions“. Their Wall-Of-Sound, psychedelic music (they must be one of the loudest bands touring Europe) inspired us to create this sort of retro sci-fi comedy about searching for life in space and looking for love on Earth.

SETI Live: Online Project Lets ‘Citizen Scientists’ Help Search for Aliens

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, has launched a new website, which invites anyone to log on and help analyze signals from space that could provide evidence of intelligent alien life in the universe.

SETI Live provides data gathered by the Institute's Allen Telescope Array, which scans sections of space for radio frequency signals.



Web users can log on to the site and help analyze the data, sifting through signals for evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization.

"There are parts of the spectrum where our sophisticated signal processing system is overwhelmed because there are so many signals," said astronomer Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research, in an interview. "I'm hoping to put together this army of citizen scientists to help figure out which signals to follow up on."

Essentially, human eyes are needed to pick up on subtle patterns that might be overlooked by SETI computer algorithms.

"The people that will do the best at this are going to be people whose pattern skills are such that they can ignore the bright pattern that's so easy to detect and look to see that there's something else there, something fainter, and see if they can in fact discover this needle that's buried under the hay," Jill Tarter stated.

SETI Live came out of the TED Prize program, which awards $100,000 every year to an "exceptional individual" with "One Wish to Change the World."

Jill Tarter won the prize in 2009, revealing her wish to "to empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company." Her wish developed into SETI Live.

SETI Institute scientists have been searching for signs of intelligent alien life since the 1960s, but have yet to find anything. With the discovery of 700 extra-solar planets, the search for extraterrestrial life has become much more targeted in these regions of space.

SETI: The Early Years

SETI: Astronomers Resume Search for Intelligent Alien Life

Allen Telescope Array

CREDIT: SETI.org

Astronomers have rebooted their search for intelligent life on alien planets, and they've got thousands of targets to scan.

After hibernating for more than seven months, a set of radio telescopes run by the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute has once again begun listening for signals from the many alien planet candidates discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope, researchers announced Monday (Dec. 5).

"This morning, at 6:18, we began re-observing the Kepler worlds," Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, said Monday during the Kepler Science Conference here at NASA's Ames Research Center. "We're just extremely excited to be back on the air today."

SETI's Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is a set of 42 radio dishes located about 300 miles (500 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco. It began scanning the heavens for "technosignatures" — electromagnetic signals that could betray the presence of an intelligent alien civilization — in 2007.

SETI researchers recently started using Kepler's discoveries to guide the ATA's activities. Kepler launched in March 2009 on a mission to hunt for Earth-size planets in their parent stars' habitable zone, that just-right range of distances where liquid water — and perhaps life as we know it — could exist.

In January of this year, Tarter said, the SETI team started training the Allen array on the 54 planet candidates Kepler had detected in the habitable zone to date.

The work didn't last long, however. SETI had to shut the ATA down in April after budget problems forced the Institute's former partner, the University of California, Berkeley, to withdraw from the project.

SETI launched a crowdfunding site, www.setistars.org, in an attempt to get the array back up and running. And the public came through, donating enough money to take the ATA out of mothballs. As of Monday, citizens had chipped in more than $230,000.

Some funding help has also come from the United States Air Force, which is interested in using the array to track satellites and space debris, SETI officials said.

Many new worlds to scan
On Monday, the Kepler team announced the discovery of 1,094 new exoplanet candidates, bringing to 2,326 the total number of potential alien worlds the instrument has detected in its first 16 months of operation.

Researchers have confirmed only about 30 of these candidate planets to date, but Kepler scientists have estimated that at least 80 percent of them will end up being the real deal.

The ATA will take special interest in Kepler's candidates in the habitable zone, Tarter said. But SETI researchers hope to scan every last one of the potential planets to minimize the chances that we're blinded by our assumptions about where life "should" be.

"What we think we know actually might be a barrier to finding what is actually out there," Tarter said. "We intend to systematically explore all of these candidates."

The search of the Kepler candidates will involve scanning 9 billion different channels in a broad window of microwave frequencies. It should take two to three years, at $1.2 million per year, to search for signals from every potential alien world from the study, Tarter said.

It's exciting to focus the ATA on likely alien solar systems rather than just point the dishes toward stars and hope for the best, she added.

"We now know where to look for planets," Tarter said. "We're going to take the public's quest for technosignatures to the next level."

SETI: Rethinking the Search for Alien 'Footprints'

Any intelligent extraterrestrial life that exists probably won't announce itself by blowing up the White House, or win over the hearts of children as a lovable alien with a glowing finger.

Many scientists simply hope to find evidence of them by scanning the skies for a radio signal from a distant star's alien civilization but such efforts may also risk overlooking clues of past alien activity right here on Earth.

If aliens did leave their mark on Earth by some wild chance, we could search for the possible "footprints" of alien technology or even analyze the DNA of terrestrial organisms for signs of intelligent messages or tinkering.

Such a CSI-style forensics search could complement, rather than replace, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) astronomers who continue to look skyward, said Paul Davies, a physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz.

"My proposals aim to spread the burden from a small band of heroic radio astronomers to the entire scientific community," Davies said. "Projects like genomic SETI are an attempt to complement radio SETI, not undermine it."

SETI: Private Donors help re-open mothballed telescopes

Telescopes looking for extra terrestrial intelligence should re-open within weeks after donors replaced income lost in public funding cuts.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, had to shut the $30m (£18.3m) Allen Telescope Array in April.

Donors, including actress Jodie Foster, raised more than $200,000 (£122,000).

The 42 radio telescopes, in northern California, search space for potential signals from alien life forms.
Ms Foster was one of more than 2,400 people who contributed to the fund to save the Allen Telescope Array.

She played the lead role of an astronomer looking for evidence of aliens in the 1997 film Contact.

Science Fiction into Science Fact
In a statement on the fund-raising website she explained her support: "The Allen Telescope Array could turn science fiction into science fact but only if it is actively searching the skies."

Another donor was the Apollo 8 astronaut, Bill Anders.

The SETI Institute says the fund should be enough to keep the telescopes operating until the end of the year, though the plan is still dependent on the institute receiving money from the US Air Force to track space debris that could damage satellites.

SETI Institute Astronomer Seth Shostak told BBC News, the deal with the Air Force is not yet done but he said he is fairly confident it will go through. Even then the money will need to be ratified by Congress and so there may be a delay. He hopes the array will re-open in September or October.

Thomas Pierson, SETI chief executive, agreed that a deal with the Air Force, combined with the donations, should allow the array to start listening for space chatter once again.

Donors help re-open mothballed telescopes searching for ET

A Comet Collision to Come?

The February Eta Draconids follow a short list of other such known showers, which include the November 22 Alpha Monocerotids, which were seen last in 1995, and the September 1 Aurigids, which created a spectacular shower in 2007. The return of those showers was predicted by Jenniskens.

A telegram was issued on July 10th by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union announcing that the Earth got impacted for a few hours by a stream of dust from a potentially dangerous comet last February 4.

"This particular shower happens only once or twice every sixty years," says discoverer Dr. Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA Ames. "The stream of dust is always there, but quite invisible just outside of Earth's orbit. Only when the planets steer the dust in Earth's path do we get to know it is there."

Jenniskens heads the Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) project in California. Since last October, the SETI Institute has teamed up with Fremont Peak Observatory and UCO/Lick Observatory in monitoring the night sky with low-light video cameras in an effort to map the meteor showers in the sky over the San Francisco Bay Area. They triangulate the meteor trajectories and determine their orbit in space.

The International Astronomical Union keeps score of showers that were claimed to exist in the past and now has a list of 300+ showers that need confirmation. Only 64 showers have been established so far. Jenniskens' goal is to establish many more.

While reducing the Fremont Peak and Mountain View station observations from February 4, normally a night with not much going for it, Jenniskens discovered a handful of meteoroids that arrived at Earth from the exact same direction in the sky.

The meteoroids arrived from the direction of the star Eta Draconis, and the shower is now recognized by the International Astronomical Union as the February Eta Draconids (FEDs for short). This was the first new shower discovered in the CAMS project, and a very unusual one at that.

The meteoroids in question were moving on a very elongated orbit, typical of that of long-period comets such as Hale-Bopp. Unlike Hale-Bopp, this one passes close to Earth's orbit. Long-period comets come back to the Sun only rarely and if any one is on a trajectory to hit the Earth, we could have little warning.

Now, Jenniskens has found the trail of crumbs of such a comet, which passed very close to Earth's orbit the last time it was near the Sun. That could have been only a few hundred years ago, or many thousands.

At that time, the comet released a cloud of dust which is now returning. Some dust grains return earlier than others, depending on how elongated their orbit ended up being, and the result is a continuous stream of returning dust grains. That stream is detected only when it encounters the Earth, when the meteoroids cause a brief 2-hour meteor shower.

"Earth gets hosed typically only once or twice every sixty years by such streams," says Jenniskens. "Only when Jupiter and Saturn are back at their original positions do they steer the dust trail in our path. The trail wags in and out of Earth's path much like the Sun moves around in response to the motion of these heavy planets."

NASA Releases Big Book of Psychology of Human Spaceflight

NASA's History Program Office is releasing a new book that examines the different psychological factors that affect astronauts during space travel, especially long-duration missions.

The book, "Psychology of Space Exploration: Contemporary Research in Historical Perspective," is a collection of essays from leading space psychologists. They place their recent research in historical context by looking at changes in space missions and psychosocial science over the past 50 years.

What makes up the "right stuff" for astronauts has changed as the early space race gave way to international cooperation.

Different coping skills and sensibilities are now necessary to communicate across cultural boundaries and deal with interpersonal conflicts.

"The essays give a comprehensive overview of this complex subject, providing novel insights for behavioral researchers and historians alike," NASA's Chief Historian Bill Barry said.

"The data is important as we work to send astronauts to Mars, which will mean longer missions without real-time communication with family and friends leading to increased potential psychosocial stresses."

The book's editor, Douglas A. Vakoch, is a professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He also is a manager at the SETI Institute.

The book is available for purchase through the Government Printing Office here.