Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - SETI Scientist Jill Tarter Continues the Search

Episode Date: April 2, 2012

The Director of the Center for SETI Research is thrilled to have the Allen Telescope Array back in the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence. She also tells us about SETILive.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, dear podcast listeners of Planetary Radio. Matt Kaplan here with a special message, a little secret message to all of you. First of all, as I say during the radio show, this online version has about an extra five minutes of my conversation with Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute. I wish I'd had room for it in the radio version, but, you know, rules are rules, and so you guys get to hear it here. It's pretty entertaining stuff. She's quite amazing. The other request is one that I've made before, and that is, of course, you know, we'd love it if you wanted to actually support the show by becoming a member of the Planetary Society at planetary.org, or just donating to the show, which you can do at planetary.org slash radio. But short of those, or maybe in addition to those,

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SETI researcher Jill Charter, this week on Planetary Radio. this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. She will be forever identified with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And that's just fine with Jill Tarter. We'll talk with her about the reactivation of the Allen Telescope Array, and a way for you to join the search for ET with your own eyes. So much more in store,

beginning with Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, it's the beginning of the month. That means it's time for you to take us on a short exploration of the solar system. What's up? What's up? Well, there are 16 spacecraft actively returning scientific data from across the solar system, which is really just, I mean, stop to think about it. That is a huge number of robots that we have operating across the solar system. The highlight for me this month is that Cassini is going to be flying close by Enceladus, as well as several of Saturn's other icy moons, which, you know, it's done periodically. You get some great photos of these moons. But we have to cherish these images that we're going to be getting in April and May because pretty soon Cassini is going to be changing its orbit so that it is no longer orbiting in the same plane as the moons. And we're not going to get very many of these close flybys for another year. So let's enjoy them while they come.

Absolutely. And it is awfully nice to think of this family of spacecraft out there. Just one other mention about this. Who is this fellow who's done this terrific diagram where you can see where everything is? His name is Olaf Frone, and he's just one of many random contributors. Well, not random, but carefully selected contributors. One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that there are certain people who just have a passion for doing one thing. And I can collect the contributions of these one-thing people

and make quite a broad blog. And one of these is that Olaf Rohn makes these wonderful diagrams, and he carefully shifts the position of each spacecraft and each planet to show exactly where they are at this current moment in time. So if you were to animate his diagrams going back in time, you'd see how everything in the solar system was shifting. It's really great, the work that he does. And it would make a wonderful poster. Well, it is a March 30 entry, a nice long one going through all of those different spacecraft.

We'll come back to Saturn for a quick finish here. This is this really striking image you have of this little moon of Saturn with what came to me as kind of a surprising background. That's what's so striking to me. Most of the time we see photos of moons in space and they're against a black space. But once in a while, Cassini turns its camera toward a moon and it just so happens that there's something else in the background. And Saturn being a rather large thing, especially when Cassini is close to it at the periapsis of its orbit, is looming in the background of this photo of Janus. It is so large that you can't even see any variation across Saturn. You just see this square of yellow behind Janus.

And Janus, it's an interesting sized moon. It's smaller than Mimas, which is the smallest round moon of Saturn. And so it's just a little bit lumpy. It's not quite round. It's not quite a potato. It's sort of a funky in-between kind of moon. It is, as I said, striking. You should take a look at it. It's also a March 30 entry in the Planetary Society blog

at planetary.org. Emily, great talking to you, and I look forward to doing it again next week. Thank you, Matt. She is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Catch her in those great Google Plus Hangouts on Air from CosmoQuest as well. Bill Nye is up next, and then a visit with Jill Charter. The CEO of the Planetary Society is just back from, where were you, Indianapolis? Indianapolis, Indiana. For the National Science Teachers Association annual meeting, I hear you're kind of a rock star there. Well, I mean, yeah.

Yes. Since the days of the Bill Nye the Science Guy show, these are people that have come to this convention, and now my presentation is about planetary science and the Planetary Society. And I've talked about the importance of political activism as an opportunity if you're a teacher to get your kids involved in civics.

We've got to get $300 million restored. I talked about looking for asteroids, the only preventable natural disaster. I talked about, and this is, as far as I know, this is the first science teacher convention talk that included students. They were from SEDS, the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. They love space, and they want to get involved in space exploration. They want to be rocket scientists and engineers. And they encourage the teachers, the science teachers, to use space in their science curricula. But yeah, I brought them into my presentation and I just wanted them to, and they did, convey the passion. They love

space exploration and they want everybody to be aware of the teaching opportunities. And so it's a fascinating thing. And these guys, these two guys, they're really good. This is great to see all these people so enthusiastic about science, so enthusiastic about space science. And then meanwhile, we have this crisis in politics where we've got to restore NASA's planetary science budget or everybody in the world. I don't mean to be all hyperbolic, everybody in the world will suffer a little bit if the world's largest space agency loses its ability to send spacecraft to other worlds. We do not want, nobody in our world wants that. So we're working on it. But Matt, look at the time. I know. You've got a radio show to do. I do, and we're going to go talk to Jill Charter right now, Bill.

So thank you. I'll talk to you next week. I talk to people from Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence also. I talk to them for several minutes at the Science Teacher Convention, and we are going to work together. I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the planetary guy. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society,

and he'll join us again next week for another segment here on Planetary Radio. Carl Sagan made her the basis of Ellie Arroway, the SETI scientist who finds the first firm evidence of a radio signal coming from an intelligence light years from Earth. Unlike her alter ego, Jill Charter has never dropped through a wormhole for a warm and personal interaction with E.T., but as the director of the Center for SETI Research, she spends her days and many nights conducting the SETI Institute's ongoing hunt for evidence that we are not alone. We reconnected via Skype a few days ago,

largely so that I could talk to her about a couple of exciting developments. Jill, it is a great pleasure to get you back on Planetary Radio, and I want to start by congratulating you on the reactivation of the Allen Telescope Array. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, we're really, really pleased to be back on the air. We started re-observing December 5th of last year, and we changed our strategy. So what we're doing now is we're looking where there are planets. We're looking at the 2,321 Kepler candidate planets and all of the exoplanets that have been confirmed from ground-based studies. This is incredibly exciting because, of course, among those planets discovered,

or certainly strongly suspected by the Kepler team, are those that are roughly Earth-sized. And in the HZ, the habitable zone, are you paying special attention to those? We are. We do give those targets more observing time. attention to those? We are. We do give those targets more observing time. What we're all sitting here with our appetites wedded for is the Earth 2.0. Kepler hasn't gotten that yet, an actual Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a solar-type star. We're close, but not quite there. And I think it's going to be a game changer. I think Earth 2.0 will, in fact, impact the public's impression of what the possibilities are. And you're saying this regardless of whether we find out anybody there is trying to talk to us,

I think. Well, I think the difference is going to be once people understand that there is another Earth-like planet in orbit around a solar-type star hanging in their sky, then the next question is going to be, does anyone live there? And if it turns out that Earth 2.0 comes out of the Kepler program, it's probably going to be too far away for any opportunity to do a detailed search for biosignatures. So SETI, in fact, may be the only game in town. And we're more than happy to become part of the process of trying to figure out whether anyone lives there.

Have you become convinced from the results regarding exoplanets so far that there are probably a lot more than just Earth 1.0 and Earth 2.0 out there? In terms of planets, I think we're going to find that they are surprisingly prevalent. We didn't know when we went into the Kepler mission. It was an interesting exercise to try and size the mission, how many stars had to be looked at how long the mission had to be and of course one of the things that has come out of the kepler mission is that stars are a little bit noisier than our own sun so we built the error budget assuming uh 12 parts per million of of noise from the star itself other stars are are noisier, so that means the Kepler mission has to be longer

in order to get enough transits added together to give you statistical significance. Kepler has asked for an extended mission, and of course we're all very, very hopeful that that will come through because the spacecraft is performing wonderfully. You bet. What about these searches

that are being shaped by the Kepler results? How much time do you actually spend pointing the array or some portion of the array at each one of these candidate worlds? Well, all of the array gets pointed at three targets simultaneously. So we can form up three beams on the sky within a large field of view and look at three Kepler worlds simultaneously. It takes the better part of a day at our current speed to go through all of the nine billion frequency channels for any particular target. And that speed will increase shortly, I hope, when I get some new air conditioning so I can run some new computing. It's always the low-tech stuff.

That's right. But at any particular frequency, we're spending only about 90 seconds interrogating a particular frequency. If signals are found there that don't show up in our database of known interference signals, then we immediately go back and follow up on that detection to see whether in fact it's coming from the direction of the star or planetary system we're pointing to, or whether it's leaking into the side lobes, the peripheral vision of the telescope. What do you think of the calls by some who have thought deeply about SETI and say that we ought to be staring at one particular star for a day, a week, a month, even a year? This is a good suggestion if you think that the type of signal that we are most likely to get is a transient signal that comes about because we're on someone's ping list. So some transmitter out there is going through a list of good potential habitable worlds and they transmit to one and then another and another and another and keep going around in a big loop so that we can expect that we'll get just a ping and then it won't come back again for an unknown period of time. I think that if you're going to do that kind of strategy, that you ought to stare

not just at one target, but you ought to stare in a direction where there are the maximum number of stars in your field of view. And really that means the galactic center, because that's where stellar density is highest. Those stars, however, although plentiful in your field of view, are very far away. So this is a strategy which envisions very strong transmitters. We've done some of that. The Array is not the best telescope in the world for that strategy. But when we finish the Kepler worlds in the next couple of years, we will probably go back

to our survey of the region around the galactic center along the plane. We'll hear more from SETI researcher Jill Tarter when Planetary Radio continues. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society.

The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website,

planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Jill Charter is not just a famous leader of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The holder of the Bernard M. Oliver Endowed Chair at the SETI Institute

is arguably one of the world's most famous scientists. She has utilized many tools in the search, including the recently reactivated Allen Telescope Array, a network of relatively small radio dishes near the California-Oregon border. Now that we're back to talking about the array, that had to be one of the saddest days of your life when it got mothballed. A lot of us were sad about that. It wasn't that long before you were able to generate the support that brought it back online. How do you think that came about? Well, it didn't come about accidentally. We understood that many people were as disappointed

as we were when the University of California, Berkeley, had to pull out of our partnership because they ran out of funds to operate the telescope. They ran out of funds for a lot of things, of course. Yeah, Berkeley and California are having some severe financial problems. So our challenge was to find a new partner to operate the telescope. But then we knew that once we had done that, we'd still need a big infusion of cash to allow us to bring back to the telescope all of the equipment that we'd had to pull out for safekeeping and reinstall it and reconfigure the array, get back on the air. And so in the summer, actually on the summer solstice, I think it was, we launched a crowdfunding site called SETI Stars. And within 40 days, people had matched our $200,000 challenge to provide this extra cash so that when we could begin to operate the telescope again,

we'd have the money to get up and get going and do it. And so that's how we were able to get back on the air on the 5th of December. And we are really, really grateful to all of the people who were willing to say, yeah, I want to support this. And now what we need to do is go out and say to them, well, we need your support to continue using the telescope. And so building a site where people come back again and again with small amounts of support to keep things going, that's a challenge. We're working on it. And SETISTARS.org is still up and

viable. I'm not quite sure that it's the quality of a site that will keep people coming back, but we're looking at ways of providing the statistics of what's happening every night and information that will make people want to come to the site day after day. Well, the quality of the site didn't keep me from becoming a rather minor SETI star today. I'll tell you what also helped encourage me. It was when I saw one of your other SETI stars, Larry Niven, and I thought, gosh, if the inventor of the Ring World has signed up, I think I better do it too. When you're ready to roll, we'll come on board and share our networks and our fame and notoriety to support this project. So, yes, I just wish it would happen now. It's nerve-wracking to have this wonderful, wonderful opportunity to search where there are planets and not know whether I'm going to be able to meet the payroll next month.

Well, that's SETIstar.org for anyone who wants to check it out. But there is yet another site that represents a major piece of public outreach that you have inaugurated just in the last few weeks, and that is SETI Live, which when I first heard about it, I thought, what's this? It's already been done. It's SETI at home. But it's really something quite different, isn't it? It is a different approach to SETI at Home, although it builds enormously on the popularity of SETI at Home, which launched this entire industry of distributed computing for science. What we're doing here that is different than Berkeley and the Planetary Society's SETI at Home program is to try and actively involve humans with their pattern

recognition capabilities in the search. We want to do that for two reasons. One, there are parts of the spectrum that have so many signals that our automated signal processing system gets confused. So we need humans to help us work through this region of the spectrum, learn what's there, figure out the best strategy, if possible, to work around those signals. And while we're doing that, keep our eyes peeled to see if there's anything buried underneath all of these terrestrial signals that might in fact be an extraterrestrial signal. That's the primary goal. So that's the eye on the prize. But while we're doing this, because people are involved and it isn't just their screensaver that's working on the data then we get to tell them the story about SETI about cosmic evolution about their very intimate

connection with the cosmos and in this way perhaps change their perspective to be a larger, more cosmic view of themselves and their place in the universe, and then at the same time, hopefully, be able to trivialize the differences among humans that we find so difficult today. People can find this at setilive.org. Pretty simple. It's one word, S-E-T-I live.org. And you can join the search, which is taking place, I think you're affiliated with the Zooniverse guys. We've talked to them about some of their other citizen science projects. That's exactly right. This is a citizen science project that is part of Zooniverse,

and it's being sponsored by TED and the Science Channel. And the nice thing, the whole really gratifying part of this process is that when we launched it, it was pretty crude and it is getting better day by day and people are actually helping with suggestions and putting together graphical tutorials and saying, you know, I really wish I had a tool to mark this. The discussions among the volunteers about, gee, should you mark this? Should you mark that? This is indicating this. This is indicating that.

The whole social network and discussion forum has been really active and very, very useful. And we're still building it. We're still trying to figure out how to fully integrate it with our ongoing searches because this is happening in real time we are trying to get to the point where we are using the results from the human volunteers the same way and in parallel with the results from our automated system. So we need to get the data out to humans and humans' response to that data back to the telescope,

all within 90 seconds. It's been a challenge, and it will get better, but I'm really pleased that people seem to be very eager to work with us to make it better. Just a couple of other questions as we near the end of our time here, though. We may put up an extended version of this on our website at planetary.org slash radio. There are still a number of SETI searches underway around the world, two or three of them being supported by the Planetary Society. But yours is the only one that I know of that actually employs a social

scientist, a psychologist, a guy who has a terrific title. Well, you're talking about Doug Vakos, and his title is Interstellar Message Coordinator. What we're doing here is a first baby step along a path that we've known for a very long time we need to take. And that's trying to come up with some global consensus about whether we should respond to the detection of a signal with a message of our own, whether we should send back a message, and if so, who should do it? Who should speak for Earth, what should they say. Doug's project at the moment, and yet another website called Earth Speaks, is an attempt to aggregate input from all over the world,

people telling us what they think we should say to an extraterrestrial. And then with Doug's training, he's able to look through this as a database. And what he's in search of are cultural universals, things that independent of background and nationality and religious training or traditions, all people have in common and would like to share, trying to build a, I don't know, generic, if you wish, picture of who we are and what we would like to say about ourselves

to an alien intelligence. Someday we may decide to broadcast ab initio, when, in fact, we're old enough and secure enough and financially capable enough of doing it, and the world has agreed that that's what we should be doing. And this is the fodder for constructing an eventual message. So you don't necessarily disagree, but you might, with Stephen Hawking, who says we should keep our ears open and our mouth firmly shut. Well, I think Stephen is a brilliant physicist, and I think that on the topic of the nature of extraterrestrial civilizations, no one is an expert. of extraterrestrial civilizations, no one is an expert.

There is a counter view to Stevens that says that any extraterrestrial civilization sufficiently advanced to have technology that would actually bring them here is therefore much, much older than we are. And they probably can't get old without getting kinder. They will have had a planet and resources that they need to manage. And so the aggression that perhaps was so important to the evolution of their intelligence will have to evolve out of the system. will have to evolve out of the system. Steven Pinker's recently published a book that indicates we're kinder than we used to be. And perhaps an advanced and old technology

will also be kinder still. Or maybe they'll be SOBs. Maybe Steven's right. And they'll come and they'll trash the neighborhood. But if they can get here, there's little we could do about it. And if they can get here, they already know we're here from the nearly 100 years of leakage broadcasts that we've been making. our world at a distance looks like a pale blue dot with the atmospheric chemical markers of oxygen and methane and the indications of biology and life that are here. Well, maybe they'll just say, send more Chuck Berry.

Like that one. Can I ask you, I hope maybe I've earned the privilege to ask one silly question. Given the invitation, would you strap yourself inside a sphere and be dropped into a wormhole like Jodie Foster's character in Contact? In a second. Absolutely. Good for you.

Jill, thank you. It has, as always, been a pleasure to talk to you. And once again, congratulations on the work that has really never stopped, but is now also underway once again at the Allen Array up there in Northern California. Thank you very much, Matt. Jill Charter, Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. You can hear more of our conversation in the podcast version of the show. That's at planetary.org slash radio

or on iTunes. And you can meet Jill at SETI Con 2, coming to Santa Clara, California, on June 22nd. That link is also at planetary.org. We're at the headquarters of the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, strategically located midway between Caltech and GPL. Sitting at this target, at this focus, is Dr. Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Scientists going from one place to the other, stop for water breaks. For a cool glass of libation or whatever i don't know can you have a glass of horses and camels

libation point libation point yes that's why we are a libation point so what's up so often so frequently fry my brain before I speak. Reason to live. All right. I've got to mention our friends Venus and Jupiter. Jupiter getting lower, but Venus up there, both of them bright. Venus just super bright. Look in the west after sunset. Also look for Mars getting higher in the sky over in the east in the early evening.

And we're coming up on Saturn at opposition. Opposition. On April 15th. We also have the moon near reddish Mars on April 3rd, if you pick up this podcast soon after it pops out or on the radio. Saturn right now is rising a little later in the evening, but it's rapidly moving towards that sunset rise. All right, we move on to this week in space history.

It was this week in 1973 that Pioneer 11 was launched. And it was this week in 2001 that Mars Odyssey was launched. Still cranking away around the red planet. Amazing, 2001. Now, you know what's made me upset? I forgot to ask Jill Tarter to say random space facts, so it's up to you once again.

Well, okay then. I'll do that. Random space facts! I don't know. Jill might not have been any better than that. Okay. Yeah, okay. So anyway, there's been news this week about a lot of deep ocean stuff,

including trying to recover the F1 engines from the Apollo 11 Saturn Vs. Jeff Bezos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I've taken a picture of him with his camera once. Seriously? Yes, I have. I gave him a cheese tray. Damn, you win again.

Dang. I thought I had you. Nope. Nope. All right. On to the random space fact. Each Saturn V F-1 engine had more thrust than all three space shuttle main engines combined. That is cool.

That is a great space fact. Random or otherwise. That's good. You always enjoy your Saturn V. I do. And there's good reason. And why not? That was an impressive rocket. Okay, we move on to the trivia contest. And we asked you, what do you call the gaps or drops in distribution with

semi-major axis in the asteroid belt that are caused by orbital resonances with Jupiter? Like the 3 to 1, 2 to 1 gap. How'd we do, Matt? Great. People like this one. And most of them, many of them, had never heard of this stuff. I'll give you the winner first and then some other fun stuff. It was Rich Angel, I think a first-time winner. Didn't tell us where he hails from, but Rich said they're called the Kirkwood gaps.

They are indeed. Sounds like something Appalachian. So Rich, there's your confirmation. We're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. But look at this. Look at this list from Ilya Schwartz of all these different gaps. And we also got the request from Randy Bottom that he had no idea that there were all these resonance patterns,

and he was wondering if you could take a few minutes to explain all of them. All of them? I told him no. How much time do you have? Not enough. Bottom line is when you keep coming around to Jupiter and encountering it over and over again, its gravity messes with you and chucks you out of that particular orbit, particularly if you're in the same plane. So the easiest to understand are things like when your orbital period is a third that of Jupiter, the three to one gap or two to one. We've also got, as pointed out in these emails, the crazy nine to four and seven to two. Those tend to not be as powerful. So sometimes you get a little clutter, a little lint left over in those areas. Fascinating.

Now, we did have a suggestion from William Stewart, who was disturbed, that these actually have a proper name and not an acronym. So he would like to request that the IAU rename the gaps JIGGLES. Are you ready? JIGGLES. JIGGLES. Jupiter-induced gravitational gatherings leading to empty spaces. Jiggles. Jupiter-induced gravitational gatherings leading to empty spaces.

Hereafter, they shall be known on this program as jiggles. Nice work. Okay, but here is a joke. This from Ed Lupin. Okay, here it is. What do they call it at Costco when they run out of something on the shelves? I don't know. What do they call it? Possibly a Kirkwood gap? Good one. You ought to get a shirt for that, Ed, but we're a little bit

too cheap and we're out of time. We move quickly to the history of acne in the solar system. I know a popular favorite with a lot of people. When was a dark spot first discovered on Uranus? Sorry. I've got to get my head out of middle school here. It's... You know what's terrifying is I've been in planetary science so long, even with

adolescent boys, I did not see that one coming. I should have. You should have. Alright, well, we're sticking with the question despite the disturbing connotations. When was a dark spot first discovered on

Uranus? Just the year will be sufficient. What year? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Yes, and you have until April 9th. That would be Monday, April 9th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about gutters. Thank you.

Good night. Did I mention there was no cheese on the tray? I bought it for him on Amazon. And I got a nice thank you note. He's Bruce Betts, not Jeff Bezos. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Seriously, that's your only connection? He joins us every week here on What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society. Phone home.