WEBSITE ALERT: Additional SETI@home information available on The Planetary
Society’s website at http://planetary.org/stellarcountdown/.

The SETI@home team has completed a successful run at the Arecibo radio
telescope in Puerto Rico re-observing promising radio sources in the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence. They collected data on 166 sources,
exceeding their original goal of 150 candidates in this stellar countdown.
Although the team discovered no evidence of a signal from an
extraterrestrial civilization during a quick, real-time analysis of the
data, they will take a more thorough look over the next several weeks.

The Planetary Society is the founding and principal sponsor of SETI@home,
which is based at the University of California, Berkeley. SETI@home
harnesses the computing power of four million volunteers to analyze data
from the Arecibo telescope. Designed as an innovative screensaver program,
SETI@home parcels out packets of raw data from Arecibo to be processed in
the personal computers of volunteers around the world.

“The unique aspect of this project is that the public participates in real
scientific analysis,” said Bruce Betts, Director of Projects at The
Planetary Society. “Millions of people around the world have helped get us
to the point where we could identify potential targets and take a second
look. Now the new data will go back to the SETI@home volunteers for more
help with this early but critical step in our continuing search for
extraterrestrial intelligence.”

The final tally of sources observed during SETI@home’s Stellar Countdown:

  • SETI@home candidates — 166
  • extrasolar planetary systems (that might harbor earthlike planets) –5
  • nearby sun like stars — 35
  • nearby galaxies — 15
  • candidates from Serendip SETI search – 6

Seti@home’s re-observations got underway on March 18 at Arecibo under the
direction of Dan Werthimer, Chief Scientist of SETI@home. The initial run
was interrupted by the need to use Arecibo’s giant dish to observe a rare
solar flare. On March 24 the team resumed observations and finished their run.

The candidates selected for re-observation were deemed the most interesting
radio sources found out of the billions detected since the distributed
computing project began to search for extraterrestrial intelligence in May
1999.

The Arecibo Observatory is a National Science Foundation facility that is
part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, which is operated by
Cornell University under a cooperative agreement with the NSF.