SPACE.com -- SETI's Seth Shostak: The Arecibo Diaries -- Entry 5

The signal from star 4181, seen as the horizontal white streak. This source, which pulsed about once ever minute or so, was a few dozen Hertz in bandwidth.


	SETI's Seth Shostak: The Arecibo Diaries -- Entry 5 By Seth Shostak Astronomer, Project Phoenix posted: 02:17 pm ET 22 October 2000

Once again, the SETI Institute has returned to the world's largest telescope to continue its research. Follow the institute's progress in Puerto Rico here at SPACE.com with Project Phoenix astronomer Seth Shostak's reports from the front.

Friday, October 20, 2000 9:35 p.m.

There are people who don't like this observatory. For decades, a few Puerto Rican Independentistas and members of the local communist party have railed against the Arecibo telescope, fingering it as a subtle, possibly dangerous instrument of Yankee imperialism.

The staff worried that extremists might blow up the antenna's cable moorings, with discouraging consequences for the astronomers. The communist newspaper was fond of claiming that the observatory was a repository of nuclear weapons (presumably in case of attack by Jamaica). When reporters from the paper were invited over, they intently photographed the transmitter klystrons, believing they were bombs.

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FIRST ENTRY - EVIDENCE FOR ALIENS: 'So, do you really, really think there are aliens out there?' It's a question astronomer Seth Shostak hears often. 'Yes, I do,' Shostak says, 'I wouldn't be on this plane otherwise.'

SECOND ENTRY - SCANNING FOR SIGNALS: I don't imagine that Columbus spent a lot of time at the bow of his ship, squinting at the horizon for a sign of land. He left that tedious job to some miserable hireling, sent into the rigging. Meet the modern day hireling: The System.

THIRD ENTRY - THE ART OF OBSERVING: It's 6:00 p.m., and already dark outside. We've deliberately chosen to conduct our search at night to avoid the problem caused by signals passing too near the Sun. Charged particles from Sol can turn a narrow-band signal from an easy-to-find pure tone to a difficult-to-uncover buzz. So our hunt for ET is nocturnal.

FOURTH ENTRY - LIFE IN THE TRENCHES: The guard smiled as he handed me the key: "You'll be in Jodie Foster's room." Indeed, I am. During the filming of Contact in 1997, the observatory offered Foster the plushest digs available -- a commodious bedroom in Family Unit No. 1, the largest of a dozen billets provided. Now it's mine.