I’m recently back from Australia where I visited the Parkes radio telescope (I had lived there for 6 months, while observing in 1995) that you may be familiar with from the charming movie ‘The Dish‘.  That movie tells the story of how the Parkes radio telescope ended up delivering to the waiting world the first televised images from the Apollo 11 landing. The occasion was the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing and thousands of people visited the observatory to take a walking tour of the dish and learn about the astronomical research it is used for today.

I also spent 4 days in Sydney, lecturing to the Harry Messel International Science School (probably the brightest group of high school students on our planet), and updating the media on the Allen Telescope Array.  At the Sydney Ideas Lecture I talked about extremophiles and exoplanets on the anniversary of the  lunar landing.  My media and lecture audiences down under  didn’t know a lot about TED, and it was an enjoyable challenge to explain who TEDsters are and that they are actually trying to help fulfill my personal wish to change the world – there’s nothing to compare with such a group in Oz or anywhere in the world!  In contrast, one person who is very aware of TED and its activities is Kia Silverbrook who runs Silverbrook Research in the Sydney district of Balmain.  Kia’s group is about to market a revolutionary new ink jet printer and he’s got lots of clever physicists and engineers working at his labs.  My husband Jack Welch and I gave Kia’s employees a talk about the ATA, the radio science and the SETI search programs it will accomplish, and Jack’s efforts to extend the ATA feed and receiver to higher frequencies.  To do that last trick means reliably and inexpensively manufacturing bits and pieces at much smaller scales than we do presently.  Sliverbrook Research does miniaturization really well, and several of the staff seem interested to help with our challenges.

My TED wish is beginning to take on a more concrete status.  Infosys Technologies in Bangalore is helping us clean up our signal detection software, so that we can publish it as open source code.  GitHub is hosting our open source development efforts and providing required repositories.  We’ve made initial inquiries about donations of a commodity cluster for the ATA to run the detection software in real time.  We’ve also talked to cloud resource providers about donating the storage and computational resources necessary to host about a day’s worth of raw SETI data (~40 TB) each month to enable contests to develop new signal detection algorithms that can effectively find weak, higher dimensional signals that we now miss, and to enable other contests to make those algorithms fast enough to keep up on the telescope in real-time.  Finally, we are investigating a real-time visual parsing effort that might allow eyeballs around the planet to help us find complex signals in noise – signals that no algorithms can yet detect.  In June, we held a workshop at the SETI Institute with attendees from TED, the visualization, gaming, and social network communities.  There are a whole lot of challenges, but something enjoyable, rewarding, and incredibly useful may come out of this work.

On May 17, 1999 SETI@home launched with significant excitement.  Ten years on, it remains the largest volunteer computing project in the world.  SETI@home uses distributed computing from Internet-connected home computers to parse radio data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.  Although no extraterrestrial signals have been found, volunteers remain dedicated to and involved in the project. (via Planetary News)

It is truly an amazing project fueled by volunteer spirit. The TED Prize is excited to build on that enthusiasm and commitment with Jill’s wish to develop new and exciting ways for open-source technology to allow volunteers to help in the search for extraterrestrial life.

In the three months since TED, a lot of the groundwork has been laid in order to start making Jill Tarter’s wish a reality. A TEDster, Rob Reid, came on board to work with the TED Prize and the SETI Institute to help create a 2-year action plan. We’ve spec’d out the technology requirements and are currently in conversations with companies around supporting those needs. We’re also in the midst of pulling together experts in the open source, gaming and user interface worlds to figure out how to present this data in a way that is engaging enough to keep the MANY eyeballs needed each day to find a signal that the current detection algorithms might miss.

As we move into the execution phase, we’re looking for someone to come on board to manage the process at the SETI Institute.

We are seeking someone with deep experience in managing open source software projects and the communities that power them to drive a bold & agenda-setting initiative. The initiative will involve managing a traditional open source software project, as well as a complex public-facing system that will enlist the general/non-technical public’s assistance in conducting our search. To succeed, a candidate above all needs a history of success in managing major open source projects. While it’s not essential that this person be a coding engineer, it is essential that s/he be comfortable enough with C++ code to have technically meaningful interactions with committers and the broader open source community. It’s also essential that s/he be a strong evangelist – able to speak inspiringly in public, and to energize, recruit, and maintain engagement with key influencers in the open source coding world.

The other part of the job will be governing a project that will in many ways resemble Galaxy Zoo (an intriguing “citizen scientist” system that can be found at www.galaxyzoo.org). This will involve managing a respected Web development company as it creates the site, and thereafter overseeing/”gardening” a large community of non-technical contributors. We expect this community to be self-policing and self-monitoring, like Wikipedia’s editorial community. But it will need leadership and a baseline architecture, and our hire will be responsible for delivering this.

This is a unique opportunity to work in both open source software and social media, on a project whose ramifications are literally beyond global.

This will be a full-time role at the SETI Institute for two years, funded by the money TED has allocated toward granting Jill’s wish. However, because this is a TED Prize wish, one in which many people and individuals are giving a lot to make happen, we do hope to find someone who will do this at a reduced rate. We have a large brainstorm taking place on June 1 and would love to have the right person chosen and at the table for that meeting.

Please send an email to tedprize1@ted.com if you are interested in the position.

Forward and share this opportunity on to anyone you believe possess the right skills.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

The SETI Institute is home to incredible scientists dedicated to exploring, understanding and explaining the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. Research is anchored by two centers: the Center for SETI Research, led by TED Prize winner Jill Tarter, and the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, led by Dr. Frank Drake. While the former focuses on the finding evidence of other technological civilizations, the later focuses on a wide range of disciplines to answer questions such as how did life start and evolve and how many planets exist which might support life. In the past five decades of SETI’s existence vast technological improvements has pushed all of this research ahead by leaps and bounds.

This month’s Discover magazine discusses the shifting perspective of astrobiology, the study of life in the universe.  Astrobiologists are looking into “habitable zones” – regions of space where living things could live and thrive – rather than single locations which might support life.

Adam Frank breaks down this concept into four zones: The Solar System Habitable Zone, The Galactic Habitable Zone, The Temporal Habitable Zone and The Multiverse Habitable Zone. His “Guide to Finding Alien Life” is a must read for everyone interested in what is beyond our own planet.

Some audio files for your commute…

Download the Airspeed interview with Jill Tarter to learn more about her work at SETI, the tools she uses and they ways we all can get involved in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Then check out this series of pieces of rhythmic entertainment from Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. Using vibrations recorded by radio telescopes, these recordings are meant to connect the listener more closely with the universe.  A new piece goes up on the Grateful Dead site after every concert on their tour (where the pieces are debuted).  Thus far five recordings have been posted including “The Big Bang”, “Jupiter Magnetos” and “Cosmic Debris”.

Here is part of a note from Mickey on this work:

Part of the great power of rhythmic entrainment is that one is typically unconscious of the rhythms one most deeply entrains to, and unaware of all those that operate beyond the limited ability of our senses —voraciously scanning the rhythmscape with a variety of media— to detect. But these rhythms are with us all the time — in here and out there.

Modern technology allows us to capture or imagine them —electric, atomic, magnetic, galactic— and gives us a way to translate these vibrations into sounds which we can hear. Our radio telescopes have recorded the song of the pulsar, our mathematicians have modeled the domain of the Big Bang. The Black Hole in the center of the galaxy Perseus is singing a steady note -57 octaves below middle C. I have gathered together an unruly sonic zoo of 23 of these magnificent, even dangerous space creatures, and I will be introducing them to you, one a night, as we tour the Universe of Sound, the universe will start to sing.

Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, C. Ma, H. Ebeling, and E. Barrett
(University  of Hawaii/IfA), et al., and STScI

If you live near Mountain View, California, save the date of Saturday, May 16. The SETI Institute will be hosting an interactive Family Science Faire to celebrate science and the imagination.

Meet SETI Institute scientists, including the father of SETi and author of the Drake Equation, Dr. Frank Drake. Learn about the SETI Institute’s pioneering exploration of life, our solar system, and beyond. Hear Andrew Fraknoi speak on “Why Falling into a Black Hole would be a Once-in-a-Lifetime Experience”. Participate in fun, interactive activities for youth aged 8-15 as well as other fun and creative activities for younger up-and-coming scientists.

The SETI Institute is located at 515 N. Whisman Road, Mountain View CA 94043.

Admission is free but you must pre-register!

Jill Tarter and the team at SETI explain why the Allen Telescope Array is so important to the future of their work.

As part of the International Year of Astronomy, there will be 24 hours of continuous streaming video from astronomical telescopes around the world from April 3 9:00 UTC to April 4 9:00 UTC.  The Allen Telescope Array – an effort of the SETI Institute (along with the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley) – has its 20 minutes of fame tomorrow at 4:40 pm PDT (23:40 UTC).

If you think big telescopes are cool, take a look at the teaser now, or just tune in on Friday, April 3 to see SETI observing with the ATA.

You can also follow the telescopecast and 100 Hours of Astronomy Events on Twitter.

Beyond her scientific leadership at NASA and the SETI Institute, Jill Tarter is deeply committed to science education.  She has been involved in developing curriculum for children including the Life in the Universe series, science teaching guides for grades 3-9, and Voyages Through Time, an integrated high school science curriculum on the fundamental theme of evolution in six modules: Cosmic Evolution, Planetary Evolution, Origin of Life, Evolution of Life, Hominid Evolution and Evolution of Technology.

Occasionally she corresponds with young students via e-mail.  If the student demonstrates that s/he has worked to find his/her own answers, Jill will respond as she did with 8th grade student, Oliver.

Here is a segment of their exchange:

Dear Dr. Tarter,

I am very interested in SETI and the possibility of life on other planets and feel very informed with the subject after spending time on the SETI website and doing other research. I am an 8th grade student…and I am studying SETI and the possibility of life on other planets for a long-term research project. I am very interested in Astronomy and find your work at SETI very exciting. In this project, we are encouraged to contact experts in our field and find out about their interests and experience…

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

Oliver

*Questions:* (Answers from Jill in blue)

1.  How do you sort through and read all the “noises” and radio waves that you pick up every day./

We don’t do this, our computers do.  We’ve programmed them to find patterns in the noise, the sorts of patterns that we don’t think nature can produce, but technologies can.  Of course if we are wrong about this, and haven’t selected the correct pattern, then we might miss signals that are really there.  That’s why I am excited about working with the TED community to build an environment where smart people around the world can access some of our data and create programs of their own to see if they can find complex patterns that our current signal detectors may be missing.

2.   How much of the night sky has SETI searched for possible signs of intelligent life over the past 40 years?

Forty years is a lot more than your life time, but it isn’t very long in cosmic time.  During those forty years SETI experiments have mostly been off the air, waiting for their turn on the telescope, or they’ve been piggy-backing on other astronomical search programs with limited ability to explore many frequencies.  So the bottom line is NOT MUCH OF THE SKY has been searched.  Optical and radio SETI programs have looked deliberately at a few thousand stars (our own Milky Way Galaxy has about 100 billion stars, and there are another 100 billion galaxies in the universe!).  There are about 10 billion radio channels that we’d like to explore at radio frequencies for every star in the galaxy.  We’ve sampled about 2 billion frequency channels while pointing at 1000 nearby stars, and others have piggybacked a survey of maybe 20% of the sky, but have only explored 2.5 million frequency channels. There’s a lot to do, that’s why we are building the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), to do SETI faster, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and it will do innovative radio astronomy at the same time.

3. How did you first become interested in your current field? What is most exciting about your work?

The most exciting part of my work is actually using the signal detection instruments that we built on the first sections of the new telescope we’ve built (the ATA) to search the skies for signs of someone else’s technology.  The least exciting part of my job is having to constantly ask people for money to fund this work.  answering questions from kids like you is a pretty cool piece of my job too.  I studied engineering as an undergraduate engineering student, got my PhD degree in astrophysics, and along the way I learned to program an ancient PDP-8/S computer that allowed me to become part of the first piggyback SETI searches at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, which is where we’re building the ATA today.  It was a lucky accident that I had learned to program that old mini-computer – it allowed me to understand that I lived in the very first generations of humans that could try to do an experiment to try to answer the question ‘Are we alone?’.  All that previous generations could do was to ask some wise people what they _should_ believe. With radio and optical telescopes and digital signal processing hardware, it’s now possible to observe the skies and try to find the answer.  As a young graduate student, I couldn’t think of a more exciting way to spend a career as a scientist, and I still feel that way!

Photo credit: NASA/Tony Gray

This past Friday night at 10:49 p.m. Eastern time the Kepler Space Telescope successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.  The telescope will be able to detect other Earth-like planets in orbit around sun-like stars.  For at least the next three and a half years, the Kepler Space Telescope will be observing the universe, serving as a tool to help the world come one step closer to determining if there is life in universe beyond our planet.

The SETI Institute has been deeply involved in this mission, including Jill Tarter as a member of the Kepler Mission Science Working Group.

Here are five quick facts about the Kepler, courtesy of NASA:

Kepler is the world’s first mission with the ability to find true Earth analogs — planets that orbit stars like our sun in the “habitable zone.” The habitable zone is the region around a star where the temperature is just right for water — an essential ingredient for life as we know it — to pool on a planet’s surface.

By the end of Kepler’s three-and-one-half-year mission, it will give us a good idea of how common or rare other Earths are in our Milky Way galaxy. This will be an important step in answering the age-old question: Are we alone?

Kepler detects planets by looking for periodic dips in the brightness of stars. Some planets pass in front of their stars as seen from our point of view on Earth; when they do, they cause their stars to dim slightly, an event Kepler can see.

Kepler has the largest camera ever launched into space, a 95-megapixel array of charge-coupled devices, or CCDs, like those in everyday digital cameras.

Kepler’s telescope is so powerful that, from its view up in space, it could detect one person in a small town turning off a porch light at night.