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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, May 24, 1999
Although Congress terminated NASA's SETI project (the High Resolution Microwave Survey), private philanthropy has permitted a number of SETI projects to continue around the world. At the SETI Institute, we have been holding a series of workshops to map our direction for the next few decades. Exciting opportunities exist to enlarge the historical microwave searches with radically new antennas, and to begin to explore other spectral regions as well. These opportunities will cost money, which needs to be raised, but the prospect of conducting greatly enhanced programs for SETI, in a manner that is commensal with traditional astronomy, make us confident that we can succeed.
This talk summarizes the current status of SETI on telescopes today, and projects our capabilities (growing exponentially thanks to Moore's Law) into the foreseeable future. The statement of Cocconi & Morrison in the original SETI paper of 1959 (Nature, Vol. 184, No. 4690, pp. 844-846, Sept. 1959), remains true today: "The probability of success is difficult to estimate, but if we never search the chance of success is zero."
Jill Tarter was raised and educated in the public schools of Eastchester, New York. She attended Cornell University earning a Bachelor of Engineering Physics Degree. She earned a Master's Degree and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley. Her major field of study was theoretical high-energy astrophysics.
As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, she became involved in SERENDIP, a small commensal search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations using the Hat Creek Observatory 85-foot telescope. After completing an NRC Resident Associateship at NASA's Ames Research Center, Dr. Tarter joined the newly formed SETI Program Office at Ames. She was supported by cooperative agreements, first as an Associate Research Astronomer at UC Berkeley and then as a Principal Investigator for the non-profit SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA, which she helped to found in 1984 in order to let NASA stretch its constant SETI Office R&D dollars as far as possible. Dr. Tarter served as the Project Scientist for NASA's SETI High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS) until its termination by Congress in October 1993. Today she serves as the Director for Project Phoenix, the SETI Institute's privately funded continuation of the Targeted Search portion of HRMS.
In September 1989 Dr. Tarter received 7nbsp;the Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to the field of exobiology, and in particular to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, from Women in Aerospace, a professional association in Washington, D.C. In March 1993 she received two Public Service Medals from NASA for her contributions to NASA's HRMS Project, and in February 1997 she received the Chabot Observatory Person of the Year Award. On September 15, 1997 the Board of Directors of the SETI Institute appointed Dr. Tarter to a new endowed position at the SETI Institute, the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Eugene Waluschka
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