SETI is Revived By Private Funds
by Brian Gregory
Formatted By CammoDude
01-07-2000
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saw this on the wires the other day. Glad to see we continue to look.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. _ Three months after Congress killed NASA's search for life on other planets, the project was revived by millions of dollars in private funds.
Astronomers in the SETI project said Wednesday they have raised $4.4 million of the $7.3 million they need to keep the quest going for another year.
I look forward to a day, perhaps not far off, when we hear the first evidence proving we are not alone in the universe,'' said Frank Drake, president of the SETI Institute, a private Mountain View group that organized the money-raising campaign.
The institute will manage a more limited version of SETI, which stands for search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The revived search has been renamed ``Project Phoenix'' after the mythological bird that perishes and is reborn in fire.
Donors included Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and owner of the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team, science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, Hewlett-Packard Co. co-founders David Packard and William Hewlett and Intel Corp. co-founder and chairman Gordon Moore. Amounts were not disclosed.
The money will let researchers make major improvements in the radio receiving equipment they operated for nearly 10 months last year at the Arecibo radio astronomy observatory in Puerto Rico.
In early 1995, they plan to put highly sensitive signal detectors at the huge Parkes radio astronomy observatory in Australia, said astrophysicist Jill Tarter. The former project scientist for the NASA effort is now manager of Project Phoenix.
Congress originally committed $100 million to a 10-year radio search for signals from distant planets. Astronomers already have spent $60 million developing equipment and starting the search.
But in October, Congress axed SETI's $12 million appropriation amid arguments by some lawmakers that looking for life elsewhere in the universe was pointless.
|