Word: seti
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Paul Horowitz ’65 speaks swiftly, his mouth struggling to keep pace while his mind zips along tirelessly and rapidly from one subject to the next. A leading figure in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) community and a professor of physics and electrical engineering at Harvard, he radiates quirky genius...
Horowitz’s research began in the late 70s, when Frank Drake, the founder of modern SETI, helped Horowitz obtain funding to do SETI research in Puerto Rico. Not long after, Horowitz went to the West Coast, partially at the behest of NASA, and developed his own project: Suitcase SETI...
Suitcase SETI—or, as Horowitz referred to it in a speech before the NASA Sunnyvale Symposium, “Steamertrunk SETI”—is a portable spectrum analyzer designed specifically to search for SETI transmissions. It featured autocorrelation receivers that enabled it to monitor 131,000 channels for extraterrestrial signals—far more than had previously been possible with any one device...
After a test run of 250 stars at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico that turned up nothing, Horowitz brought Suitcase SETI back to Harvard, and in 1983, Project Sentinel was launched. Project Sentinel utilized an 84-foot steerable radio telescope equipped with a renovated Suitcase SETI, located at the Oak Ridge Observatory in Harvard, Mass...
Both these projects required the construction of a more powerful spectrum analyzer than Suitcase SETI, so that more channels could be scanned. These searches covered most of the northern sky, but failed to receive any signals that were ever replicated...