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!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Jill Tarter's Wish Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.