SETI@home.(The Arecibo Dish)

The longest-running search for ra­di­o sig­nals from al­ien civ­il­iz­a­tions is get­ting a burst of new da­ta from an up­grad­ed tel­e­scope. That means dramatically im­proved search ca­pa­bil­i­ties, proj­ect sci­en­tists say—but the full ben­e­fits will be real­ized only with pub­lic par­ticipa­t­ion. They’re are call­ing for new vol­un­teers for SETI@home, a proj­ect in which or­di­nary cit­i­zens do­nate un­used time on their com­put­ers to let the machines help comb through the search da­ta.Since it launched eight years ago, the Un­ivers­ity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berkeley-based SETI@home has signed up more than 5 mil­lion in­ter­est­ed vol­un­teers, ac­cord­ing to proj­ect sci­en­tists. It boasts the larg­est com­mun­ity of ded­i­cat­ed users of any In­ter­net com­put­ing proj­ect, they said: 170,000 devo­tees on 320,000 com­put­ers. This num­ber of com­put­ers should rise by an ad­di­tion­al mil­lion to han­dle the ex­pand­ed da­ta flow.The in­creased amount of da­ta is a re­sult of new and more sen­si­tive re­ceivers and oth­er im­prove­ments to the world’s larg­est ra­di­o tel­e­scope in Are­ci­bo, Puerto Rico, said proj­ect lead­ers.The 1,000-foot wide Are­ci­bo dish, which fills a val­ley in Puerto Rico, is part of the Na­t­ional As­tron­o­my and Ion­o­sphere Cen­ter ope­rated by Cor­nell Un­ivers­ity in Ith­a­ca, N.Y. Since 1992,the project teamz have used ra­di­o ob­serva­t­ions at Are­ci­bo to rec­ord sig­nals from space and an­a­lyze them for pat­terns that could in­di­cate they were trans­mit­ted by a civ­il­iz­a­tion.