AstroNews 8/2000

SETI SPECIAL 

PERSEID METEORS TONIGHT
SPACE STATION PROGRESS
SETI@home FINDS FUNDING OUT THERE
FREE STARMAPS
OVER 40 EXTRASOLAR PLANETS AND COUNTING!
PROJECT VOYAGER & PLANETARY SOCIETY ALLIANCE

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Up This Month
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PERSEID METEORS TONIGHT

This year the shower will be mostly washed out by the light of the waxing gibbous Moon. From 11 p.m. to moonset you may see a meteor every few minutes. There will be an hour or so of dark sky after moonset and before the first light of dawn Saturday morning; during this time you may see about a meteor a minute.

SPACE STATION PROGRESS

After one more supply run from a U.S. space shuttle in September, the station should be ready for its first long-duration crew to arrive in the fall.

The first crew to take up residence -- two Russians and their American commander -- will be dedicated to maintenance and construction. The start of science operations will have to wait for the arrival of a U.S. laboratory module in late January, if NASA can keep to its tight schedule of shuttle launches through the end of the year.

Even then, the long-duration crews, inhabiting the station 250 miles above Earth, will have to focus on construction at the expense of science until the station is nearly completed and supporting crews of seven.

NASA is counting on the science aboard the ISS to push the boundaries in biology, chemistry, astrophysics, medicine and engineering.

For example, scientists already have learned that cell tissue ages more slowly in the near weightlessness of space than it does under Earth's gravity, said Dr. Milburn Jessup, a cancer researcher at the University of Texas.

Such a finding has the potential, at least, to lead to new methods of slowing cancer's progress, or even slowing the aging process. Jessup's experiments conducted in weightlessness have been limited to two short-duration shuttle flights.

"The primary product of the space station is going to be knowledge," said Clark. "We're not going to use it for production -- not right away."

SETI@home FINDS FUNDING OUT THERE

 Today, a 15-month-old extraterrestrial search project, SETI@home, is expected to announce a new partnership with a group co-founded by Joe Firmage of Los Gatos, whose interest in things intergalactic cost him his job as CEO of USWeb/CKS last year.

 Funding to expand SETI@home will also come from the Planetary Society, a space interest group founded by Carl Sagan, the late astronomer who popularized interest in space with his TV program.

 SETI@home is a small University of California-Berkeley project that harnesses the collective computing power of more than 2 million home and office computers to scan data for a signal from space.

 Today's announcement follows last week's that a separate organization, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, was receiving $12.5 million from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold to help build the largest telescope specifically to seek out signals from other civilizations.

 In both cases, the money will accelerate research in the field of study known as SETI, Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, which begins with the belief that among the half trillion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, one may have the technical ability to send a signal thousands of light years away.

 The techno-wealthy ``are future-oriented, like many Americans, interested in discovering new things, not content to rest on our laurels, but searching for the unknown,'' said Alan Dundes, a UC-Berkeley professor of anthropology and folklore. But he sees the spending as a ``substitute for religion, perhaps,'' simply a ``toy'' for the rich.

 In 1993, Congress cut off funding to NASA projects that probed for extraterrestrials, with one congressman deriding the field as the ``great Martian chase.'' Since then, SETI work has relied on a hodgepodge of grants and donations.

 In the case of SETI@home, which has an annual budget of $400,000, the first donation of $100,000 came from Paramount Pictures, which wanted to use the project in the promotion of the film ``Star Trek Insurrection.'' Other contributors of money or technology have included Sun Microsystems, Fuji Film and Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock in the ``Star Trek'' TV series and movies.

 The new donation to SETI@home is of an undisclosed amount but ``several million,'' Firmage said in an interview Monday. It comes not a moment too soon for SETI@home, run by two part-time workers who maintain the Web site and respond to the 2 million people -- about 1.5 million more than the founders expected -- who hope to find E.T. Every day, 3,000 new users sign up.

SETI@home's popularity has brought an unexpected problem -- finding enough for the participants to do. SETI@home currently collects and analyzes data from the world's largest telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. The eager -- and often competitive -- SETI@home participants are nearly finished analyzing data from the
 part of the sky it can scan.

 David Anderson, a computer scientist and the SETI@home director, fretted about what he could do to keep his people happy. He could give them busywork by sending three or four people the same packets of data. Or he could stop the whole project cold once all radio signals are recorded in the sky visible to Arecibo.

 Either way, he'd have a revolt on his hands. The project has given participants a daily, convenient way to help out in answering one of the most profound questions facing humankind: Are we alone?

 But with the infusion of cash, SETI@home will be able to shift to a telescope in Australia, giving it a vantage from the Southern Hemisphere. And it will deepen its analysis of the data.

 Firmage, 29, a SETI@home participant, gained notoriety after his interests in UFOs and space travel became known. Citing media attention about his beliefs, he resigned from USWeb, the company he co-founded that was merging with CKS, and started Intend Change, a venture firm. Firmage plans to promote SETI@home in a science-oriented media company, code named Project Voyager, which he is creating with Ann Druyan, Sagan's widow.

 For SETI@home, such exposure may attract even more hordes. ``It will expose us to a big class of users who haven't heard of us yet,'' Anderson said. ``We could see another doubling of our user base.''

 Corporations such as Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and Silicon Graphics compete weekly to outcompute each other. Thousands of SETI@home clubs have cropped up. One goes by the name ``Let's kick some alien butt.''
[Source: Michelle Quinn, San Jose Mercury]
 

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http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

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FREE STARMAPS

Pacific Science Center's Monthly Starmaps (in Adobe Acrobat format)
http://dev.pacsci.org/public/exhibits_planetarium/Starmaps/mapdefault.html

Peoria Astronomical Society 3D Star Maps (require VRML plug-in, standard in current browsers)
http://www.astronomical.org/astbook/starexp.html

3D Starmap - Winchell Chung offers a lot of maps and links here - click on Freebies!
http://www.clark.net/pub/nyrath/starmap.html

National Geographic Star Journey Chart - a classic
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/97/stars/chart/

What's UP This Month has monthly star charts and more
http://www.members.home.net/abdale/

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OVER 40 EXTRASOLAR PLANETS AND COUNTING!

To date, only one Sun-like star has been found with multiple planets: Upsilon Andromedae, around which the same team discovered three planets last year.

The three new planets discovered are large gas giants similar to the planet Jupiter. All are in highly eccentric orbits that alternately bring them close to the planet and carry them far away. This dance alternately drags the star toward and away from Earth by a distance about half the radius of the star, causing a Doppler shift in the star's light that astronomers can detect.

Interestingly, all three of the new stars are rich in the heaviest atoms, like iron, meaning the stars were formed from dust that had already been cycled through at least one other star. This continues a trend of high metallicity among stars with known planets.

Astronomers from UT Austin's McDonald Observatory and other members of an international planetary research team have discovered a new planet in a solar
system only 10.5 light-years away from Earth. The planet, which is composed of gas, is orbiting a star called Epsilon Eridani. Epsilon Eridani is the fifth brightest star in the constellation Eridanus.

"Detecting a planet orbiting Epsilon Eridani -- a star very similar to our own Sun and only 3.22 parsecs from Earth -- is like finding a planet in our own backyard, relatively speaking," said Cochran. "Not only is this planet nearby, it lies 478 million kilometers (or 297 million miles) from its central star -- roughly the distance from the Sun to the asteroid belt in our own solar system."

"The exciting thing about this discovery is that having a large planet orbiting fairly far out from Epsilon Eridani means there could be room for Earth-like planets in a reasonably stable orbit closer into the star," Cochran said. "All the planets found so far that are the size of Jupiter are much closer to the parent star. It means there could be room for an Earth-like planet closer to Epsilon Eridani and -- perhaps -- in a habitable zone."
 
 
 

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FAR OUT FACTS
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PROJECT VOYAGER & PLANETARY SOCIETY ALLIANCE

Within the terms of the agreement, Project Voyager and The Planetary Society will collaborate on science education and media projects focused on the exploration of the solar system and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) over the next two years, including University of California, Berkeley's ground-breaking SETI@home project.

"As we enter a new millennium, humanity has just begun the epic quest to explore our solar system and search for life elsewhere in the Universe. Our team is privileged to collaborate with the Planetary Society in this quest. Together we will advance shared ideas and ideals of science through research, education, and entertainment, fulfilling the high standards we have established within our plan," said Joe Firmage, chairman and CEO of Project Voyager.

The Planetary Society announced it will assume the lead sponsorship role for SETI@home, ensuring the project will continue to operate. SETI@home enables over 2 million people around the world to process signals in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The project had been scheduled to end next year in May 2001, but will now be continued and expanded. The Planetary Society's sponsorship, part of an alliance with an integrated media network that is temporarily named Project Voyager, will also allow the SETI@home team to enhance the project's scope and increase its search capability to include regions visible only from the southern hemisphere.

The distributed computing network of SETI@home operates as the most powerful computer on Earth, and its progress to date represents the largest computational task in history. The Planetary Society was the founding sponsor of SETI@home, which was developed at the University of California, Berkeley. "The Planetary Society's expanded role enables SETI@home to become bigger and better, and continues two decades of Society leadership in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence," said Bruce Murray, President of The Planetary Society. "The Society has supported SETI continuously since 1980 with a dozen different projects around the world."

The Society's increased support of SETI@home is part of an unprecedented new strategic alliance with Project Voyager, led by Ann Druyan of Carl Sagan Productions and Joe Firmage of Intend Change. The new alliance will allow the Society to merge the power of space exploration with the tremendous outreach potential of the Internet, expanding its Internet presence and initiating new programs for public participation. "The alliance between The Planetary Society and Project Voyager provides an exciting opportunity to expand the global experiment of SETI@home and to associate the respected expertise of the Society with the creative web savvy of Project Voyager," said John Logsdon, Director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and a member of the  society's Board of Directors. "The alliance is a win-win situation, with the real beneficiaries being all those interested in a deeper understanding of the cosmos and humanity's place within it."

While Project Voyager will help fund Society programs, The Planetary Society will provide science content to Project Voyager's forthcoming Internet portal. The Society and Project Voyager also plan to develop innovative educational material about the SETI@home project, SETI in general, and the new field of astrobiology. "The Planetary Society's mission is to share the wonder, the majesty, and the discoveries of space exploration with people worldwide," said Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and another member of the Society's Board of Directors. "The Society's alliance with Project Voyager will leverage this outreach in exciting and innovative ways."
 
 

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