AirSpaceMag.com

The Allen Telescope Array is back online.

If any of you aliens out there rang our Earth line this summer, would you kindly try dialing in again? After an eight-month down time, SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — is back up and running this week thanks to an influx of funds. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Northern California, SETI’s primary search facility, was forced into hibernation on April 25 by severe budget cuts. “Hibernation” meant it would be staffed by a skeleton crew to keep the facility safely maintained, but all observations would cease.

ATA started operations in 2007 as the first radio observatory built specifically to scan for intelligent life elsewhere. It was funded primarily through the National Science Foundation and the State of California, through UC Berkeley, which co-operates the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, where ATA is located, with SETI, but both sources slashed their contributions earlier this year. In an April letter to supporters, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson said that NSF funding “has been reduced to approximately one-tenth of its former level … compounded by growing State of California budget shortfalls.”

The nonprofit organization spent a summer passing the hat, launching SETI Stars to raise over $200,000 through online donations, including one from Contact star Jodie Foster, and teaming up with the U.S. Air Force, which hopes to use the facility for tracking objects in orbit. Scientists fired up the ATA on Monday, starting with some of the most recent discoveries by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research, said in a press release, “For the first time, we can point our telescopes at stars, and know that those stars actually host planetary systems – including at least one that begins to approximate an Earth analog in the habitable zone around its host star.”

The SETI Institute will continue to raise funds to keep the ATA running, and plans to spend the next two years studying the Kepler catalog. On the same day ATA went back online, the Kepler team confirmed they’d found their first planet, Kepler 22-b, orbiting in the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun.

Poison-munching bacteria: Mmmmm...arsenic.

Score another one for the extremophiles.

Biologists had already discovered organisms that can survive everything from high levels of radiation to vacuum to total darkness. Now they’ve found one that uses arsenic as a substitute for phosphorus, one of the six elements (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur and phosphorus) we thought until now was necessary for life. Astrobiologists are excited, because it’s one more way extraterrestrial life could evolve.

Like that search wasn’t complicated enough already.

Read more here.

December 8 update: Not everyone’s buying it.

Where to look? And how? Photo: ESO/APEX/DSS2/ SuperCosmos/ Deharveng(LAM)/ Zavagno(LAM)

Most people date the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) to Frank Drake’s Project Ozma, conducted in 1960 using the giant dish at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.

Today through Wednesday, at an NRAO workshop, SETI-ologists will review where their field stands on its 50th anniversary. Tune in to the webcast here.

Then read Paul Davies’ provocative new book, The Eerie Silence, and talk to the author in our online chat on September 20.

In researching a reader’s letter about “Department of Flying Saucers” in the Sept. 2010 issue, I came across a report on the Web site, UFO Casebook, which claimed that General Omar Bradley had been flown overseas to view alien beings retrieved from a UFO crash site in the Arctic Circle. The report writer, Billy R., put it thusly: “In the early 50s her husband, who did not talk much about his work, told her he had flown the general to Germany to see some little space men approximately 3 feet tall and dead.”

Well. Surely that beats alien vampires, who would perhaps be the same height but undead.

“It was 58 years ago today that the Roswell incident occurred,” said Roger Launius, a National Air and Space Museum Space History curator who could also be considered  NASM’s chief skeptic. (An earlier talk of his concerned people who refuse to believe the Apollo program landed men on the moon.) His “Ask an Expert” presentation for museum visitors,  ”Assessing the Legacy of the Roswell Incident,” clearly defined fact versus fiction in the UFO craze that got its start at New Mexico’s Roswell Army Air Field in July 1947—shortly after pilot Ken Arnold coined the term “flying saucer” to describe what he saw on a flight one June afternoon.

“Most Ask an Expert presentations focus on an artifact,” said Launius. “Unfortunately, we have no artifacts from Roswell. Maybe in the future, we will [SNERK].” Fellow snerker David DeVorkin had dusted off his tin foil hat, which he had worn at the “No Apollo” talk, and later lobbed a few softball questions at his Space History co-worker.

All the fuss and feathers arose from debris found by rancher Mac Brazel, who brought it to county sheriff George Wilcox, who notified Roswell Army Air Field, where, the story goes, a colonel okayed a press release that stated the base had captured a flying saucer. There is no documentation whatsoever on how this info was released to the local newspapers, and, as Launius put it, the stories from the major players, some of whom lived into the 1990s, “got better with time.”

The next day, the Army debunked the entire tale, but the damage was done, and the UFO craze continues today, with Roswell and its UFO Museum a big tourist attraction.

What really happened? Project Mogul. Mogul, conceived by Columbia University’s Maurice Ewing, involved a 600-foot-long chain of high-altitude Mylar balloons, microphones, sensors, and  instrumentation designed to audibly detect Soviet A-bomb tests. Mogul Flight 4 was launched from Alamogordo on June 4, 1947, and is likely the source of the debris Brazel brought to Sheriff Wilcox. Although that doesn’t make for nearly as much whoop-dee-do as alien autopsies, another Roswell legacy.