Word: antennas
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...THERE, TRYING TO GET IN touch with us, his message may well be received first in a quiet rural setting 30 miles northwest of Boston. There, atop a hill overlooking a snow-covered apple orchard and the frozen remnants of a pumpkin patch, a dish-shaped antenna, 84 ft. across, faces skyward, attuned to the murmurings of the cosmos...
...That antenna is a Harvard-Smithsonian radio telescope, the Brobdingnagian ear of the newly dedicated project BETA, the latest and most ambitious effort yet in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The search has been doggedly conducted over 31/2 decades by small bands of devoted scientists around the world. It's a quest not only for life beyond the Earth but for life intelligent and capable enough to transmit meaningful radio signals across vast stretches of empty space...
Inside BETA's one-story control room, a workstation displays patterns of green and red spikes; lights blink on a bank of small computers; and needles flutter on glowing dials. From a stereo amplifier comes a static-filled hiss, the audio version of radio waves piped directly from the antenna above. The display amuses graduate student Darren Leigh, hard at work debugging a BETA computer program. "We do a few things here for the tourists," he explains. "Camera crews love this stuff...
...often suspect that Priscilla has some kind of antenna in her office that picks up new ideas and stories before anyone else has tuned into them," says assistant managing editor Steve Koepp. Of course, if there's a gene for journalism, Painton may enjoy a hereditary advantage. Her father Fred Painton is a TIME writer of long standing. Because he was frequently posted abroad, his daughter was born in Rome and graduated from high school in Paris, where, she says, "politics is inhaled with the first breath...
Along the way, however, Galileo suffered a serious setback. In 1991, when J.P.L. controllers attempted to deploy the spacecraft's main, 16-ft.-wide, umbrella-like antenna--which had been tucked away during the Venus encounter to protect it from solar radiation--three of the antenna's 18 ribs got stuck. Despite more than 13 months of ingenious and increasingly desperate measures to shake these ribs loose, the antenna, which had been capable of transmitting 134,400 digital bits per second (or a complete image in about a minute), remains unusable...